You might not know, but a thousand years ago, shamans in Central Asia beat drums in hypnotic cycles to steady breath and spirit. However, today, millions of people open Spotify’s Peaceful Piano playlist or YouTube’s “ADHD focus” playlists for the same reason, which is to regulate emotion with rhythm. 

For centuries, music has been a type of medicine, even far earlier than our scientific understanding could explain it. But nowadays, cognitive neuroscientists have found that listening is not a passive act, but actually a deeply predictive process. According to Making Sense of Music by Elvira Brattico and Marianna Delussi, the brain can make sense of sounds and anticipate patterns in them. When familiar songs replay, dopamine will surge, cortisol will drop, and the damaged neural pathways will reorganize. For instance, patients recovering from stroke regain speech more quickly when daily sessions include music (Särkämö et al., Brain, 2008). In this case, the “adhd focus” music and the peaceful playlist can all rewire us. Meanwhile, research shows that group singing can synchronize heart rates and release oxytocin, the hormone tied to trust and social bonding. What online playlist with algorithms attempts through data to align signals and predict emotion, humans have long achieved through synergic breath and voice.

So what really happens when modern technology comes in? AI-generated soundscapes like Endel, a Berlin-based company that produces “AI-powered, science-backed soundscapes to improve focus, relaxation, and sleep,” promise functional sound therapy, and they can adjust to our biometrics and moods in real time. The promise of personalized sound medicine is seductive, since it is portable, data-driven, and democratic in essence. But as ethnomusicologist Sandra E Trehub, Judith Becker, and Iain Morley caution, Musical behaviors are “highly diverse in their structures, roles, and cultural interpretations.” In this case, the universality and neutrality in music can be a myth; the politics of preference can be hidden. When algorithms equate calm with consonant piano chords, they risk prescribing one culture’s notion of serenity as a universal truth.

When streaming platforms promise calm through predictive playlists, they risk confusing connection with control. In this sense, music that is designed to manage us can numb as easily as it soothes. 

Yet as a tool, technology is not the enemy. It is more important how we use it. If we use it with awareness, it could deepen instead of erase cultural distinctiveness. What algorithms mimic in data, humans always achieve through presence and connection. We can draw inspiration from Ewe drumming, Persian maqam, or gospel polyphony, each with its own neurological and emotional architecture. The future of music and mental health may depend on bringing these three languages, scientific, technological, and cultural, into conversation. Neuroscience can help us understand how rhythm reshapes the brain, and ethnomusicology reminds us how and why music is important because it binds communities and generations from culture to culture. And more importantly, technology can bridge the gap between them if used in a proper manner.

All these transformations, from shamanic drumming to algorithmic playlists, have the same truth beneath the surface. Sound can restore coherence when the world fragments. But more importantly, it is the human who brought music together that matters, it is the shaman's tribe, it is the underground rock bands, it is the church choirs, it is the niche but countless online fans communities that share a connection that really makes music alive, their drumbeat, the chant, the hum and tap of keyboard, all are attempts to make chaos meaningful again, turning vibration into relation. We should not only respect their diversity, but also accept them, walk into them, and become one of them. The next frontier of therapy may not come from more precise data, but from better listening, from rejoining the pulse that has always bound us to one another.