Three days of partying, three days of crowds, three days of loud music. Every year at the Wacken Open Air, around 80,000 metal fans gather on a field in a small town in Schleswig-Holstein. For researchers from Leipzig, the 2023 festival became an open-air laboratory. They investigated whether the intense festival experience and heavy metal music influence how long people can endure pain.
Lydia Schneider and Tom Fritz from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI-CBS) in Leipzig therefore conducted on-site research to determine whether the festival experience somehow influences the fans’ pain tolerance. Research to date shows that suppressed anger can intensify the experience of pain in people with chronic pain. “That’s why we wanted to investigate whether the experience of pain changes – especially with a music genre like heavy metal, which expresses quite a few unpleasant emotions, particularly anger,” explains Lydia Schneider, the study’s first author.
In 2023, she and her team traveled to the festival grounds. 122 metal fans held their hands and forearms in ice-cold water for as long as possible for the sake of science. Beforehand, the researchers had measured their heart rates and heart rate variability using an ECG. “There was a huge rush to participate in the experiment, and we realized that science holds a high place in the scene,” recalls Schneider. Since alcohol can unpredictably affect pain tolerance, the scientists also examined participants who had consumed no, little, or moderate amounts of alcohol on the day of the test. The correlations under investigation were most clearly evident in this group.
What this could mean for pain patients
Tom Fritz heads the “Music-Evoked Brain Plasticity” group at the institute and puts the results into context. Music in pain therapy usually focuses on relaxation, but when dealing with anger, other types of music might also be worth exploring. “Acceptance of unpleasant emotional states or difficult situations plays a central role in resilience and pain tolerance, and listening to angry music can therefore be beneficial rather than masking unpleasant emotions with positive ones,” says Fritz.
However, the study did not investigate whether heavy metal can actually help people with chronic pain or even prevent the onset of chronic pain. Fritz sees music that expresses anger as a potential avenue for further research.
Original publication:
Schneider, L., Fritz, T.H. Increased pain resilience among heavy metal music festival attendees. Sci Rep 16, 26203 (2026).
