Chanting, Mantra and Drumming: Traditions and Research

What this page covers

Chanting, repeating a sacred word or phrase, and playing or listening to drums are part of the worship, community life and healing practices of many peoples. They are not one tradition. A Buddhist name-chant, a Hindu or yogic mantra, the cantillation of Quran recitation and a West African djembe circle each have their own meaning for the people who practice them. This page does not teach any practice or ceremony. It explains how researchers have studied the sound-and-repetition side of these practices, and where the research stops. For related guides see types of meditation and sound healing and gong baths.

Traditions are one thing, tests are another

For people who practice them, chanting and drumming may be devotion, remembrance, grief work or community. Research cannot measure whether a practice is spiritually true, and we do not try. It can measure things like stress ratings, heart rate or pain scores in a defined group, compared with something else. Those two kinds of knowledge answer different questions.

NCCIH, the US government's center for complementary health research, describes meditation as including practices that focus on a sound or a mantra, which it defines as a repeated word or phrase. [1]

Mantra repetition: what trials measured

A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis pooled randomized trials of meditation based mainly on repeating mantras, including Transcendental Meditation. Compared with control conditions, it found small-to-moderate reductions in anxiety, depression, stress and post-traumatic stress symptoms. [2] The authors say the evidence is weakened by risk of bias, few studies in people with psychiatric diagnoses and little long-term follow-up. [2] Evidence label: promising but limited.

A single randomized trial of Transcendental Meditation in 80 health care workers (open-label, compared with usual wellness resources) did not find a statistically significant change in its main measure, psychological distress. It did find larger improvements in burnout-related emotional exhaustion, anxiety and insomnia scores at three months. [3] Because people knew which group they were in, expectation may play a part. Transcendental Meditation is a specific taught program; results do not automatically apply to other mantra traditions.

Chanting and group singing

In a small brain-recording study, 21 Buddhists with chanting experience silently chanted the name of a Buddha, chanted "Santa Claus," or stayed silent while viewing disturbing pictures. A late-stage brain response to the pictures rose in the other two conditions but not during the Buddha chant. [4] This measured short-term brain and heart responses in a laboratory, not illness or recovery.

A systematic review of group singing for long-term pain found 13 studies and reported that singing reduced pain intensity in most of them, with weaker support for pain interference and depression. The authors concluded support was only partial, based on limited evidence of varied quality. [5] Singing is not the same as devotional chanting, so treat this as related, not identical, evidence.

Reviews of listening to Quran recitation (mostly in Iran and other Asian countries) report lower anxiety scores in many studies, but call for methodologically stronger trials. [6] One randomized trial in 60 hemodialysis patients compared listening to recitation with no intervention. [7] Listening to a comforting sound and receiving attention are hard to separate from the content of the recitation itself.

Drumming

A 40-minute djembe session lowered stress and anxiety scores right afterward in two small groups, and blood pressure fell in the older group. [8] There was no comparison group. An umbrella review of music and dance participation reported broad health benefits, with drumming among the activities linked to the widest benefits, while noting the evidence base is young and varied. [9]

A laboratory study asked whether drumming paired with "shamanic journeying" instructions did more than relaxing music. In 39 volunteers, stress hormone levels fell in every condition, with no difference between them, although people reported different subjective experiences. [10] This site does not describe shamanic or other ceremonial practice; see Shamanism: a public overview and what is public and what is restricted.

Bottom line

There is reasonable early evidence that repeated-sound practices can reduce self-reported stress and anxiety for some people, and little evidence about disease outcomes. They can sit alongside medical care, not in place of it. For goal overviews see mindfulness and meditation for stress and relaxation techniques.