Audioanalgesia (or audio-analgesia) is the relief of pain (analgesia) using white noise or music (that is, via audio equipment) without using pharmacological agents (that is, without analgesic drugs), usually during painful medical procedures such as dental treatments or some outpatient surgical procedures.
This makes it similar to breathing exercises during labor cramps before epidural administration of anesthetics.
[citation needed] It has also been suggested that music may stimulate the production of endorphins and catecholamines.
[citation needed] Audioanalgesia self-evidently has some neurophysiologic analogies to stimming for relief of psychomotor agitation (especially auditory stimming) and in fact to any act of listening to white noise, calming sounds, or music for purposes of stress relief and relaxation.
The full mapping of those analogies (including the identification of any common neural pathways shared by these analogues) awaits further development of neuroscience.