In 2007, Charlotte Gainsbourg – the French singer and actor, daughter of Serge – had a water-skiing accident. She suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and spent the weeks that followed in and out of hospital, including repeated MRI scans. Most people go through the experience once or twice and try to forget it. Gainsbourg listened.

“Every time I was in that tube, I was thinking it would make great music,” she later told Pitchfork.

Two years after the accident she released IRM – French for MRI – produced by Beck. The title track pulses and hums in the same rhythmic way the machine does. Gainsbourg had noticed something real. The scanner is, in its own mechanical way, a musical instrument. Engineers have been playing with that fact for decades, and the reasons music helps when you’re inside one are more interesting than the obvious answer.

The Scanner That Played Deep Purple

In 2001, at a conference of magnetic resonance engineers, a team demonstrated an MRI scanner playing the opening riff of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water”. No external speaker. The scanner itself.

The noise an MRI makes isn’t incidental. It comes from the gradient coils – the parts of the machine that switch rapidly during a scan to build an image. When the coils switch, they vibrate. The vibrations have pitches. By altering the speed and pattern of the switching, engineers can change those pitches. String enough pitches together in the right order and you’ve got a tune.

It’s the same physics that makes a scan sound like a pneumatic drill having an argument with a fax machine. The engineers just found a way to play the drill.

Why Music Helps – And What The Evidence Actually Says

Playing music through the headphones during a scan reduces anxiety and makes the noise feel less severe. That part is well established. What’s less settled is whether it matters what the music is.

The intuition – that patients should choose their own – is appealing. It feels respectful, calming, human. A 2024 systematic review in the Radiography journal complicated it. Looking across dozens of studies, the authors found that patient-selected music isn’t reliably better than music chosen by clinicians. What seems to matter more is the shape of the music: volume around 50 to 60 decibels, tempo between 60 and 80 beats per minute, a predictable structure, a stable rhythm. Familiarity with a track helps. Slow tempo helps more than you’d expect. Whether or not the track happens to be a personal favourite matters less than most people assume.

So why do radiographers still ask what you’d like to listen to? Because agency itself calms people. Being offered a choice – any choice – before sliding into a small tube for twenty or thirty minutes seems to settle the nervous system regardless of what ends up playing. The asking does most of the work. The science is still being sharpened, an NHS-registered trial is currently comparing patient-selected against clinician-selected music in real scans, but for now the practical answer is simple: yes, pick something.

If you’re wondering how long an MRI will actually take, we’ve written about that separately.

Good Vibrations

The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” came out in 1966. The spooky, swooping sound in the chorus is a theremin – one of the first electronic instruments, and one of the few you play without touching. You move your hands through an electromagnetic field and the field disturbance makes the noise.

An MRI does the same thing in reverse. It generates an electromagnetic field, you lie inside it, and the disturbance – your body’s water molecules swinging into alignment and back out again – is what produces the image. The theremin turns field disturbance into sound. The MRI turns field disturbance into a picture of your shoulder.

Which is roughly what Gainsbourg worked out, lying in the tube listening. There’s music in the noise if you want it there.

If you’ve got an MRI coming up, talk to us about which music you’d like us to play.