A Randomized Controlled Trial of Music Use in Parturients Admitted to Labor & Delivery

Subjects will be asked their preferred music choice before they are randomly assigned to either the intervention music group, or the no music control group.

The study's active intervention group will be listening to the subject's preferred music for a duration of 10 minutes. The subjects will listen to their preferred music choice played from a speaker connected to an audio device, both supplied by the research team. The investigator and the patient will collaborate on patient positioning of the audio device for sound to optimize comfort and safety during the study intervention. Researchers will confirm the volume of the music and assess subject's comfort before leaving the room for 10 minutes while they listen to music. Subjects must turn off all other noises such as television, other music being played, phone calls ringer/vibration, and texting notifications will be turned off prior to initiation of the study. Phone calls and texting may be left on for subject's who request this. The study team will wait outside the door for 10 minutes, before re-entering. Nursing and providers essential to care will be notified that the subject is participating in the study to ensure no one enters the room unless medically necessary or in case of emergency during this 10-minute time period.

The Control group will not listen to music. The study team will still leave the room for 10 minutes and then re-enter to continue collecting data at each of the time points as below:

Before the intervention begins, researchers will collect from all parturient subjects' their anxiety score (on a scale of 0-10, with 0 being no anxiety), ask them to complete the STAI questionnaires on paper to collect their scores (submitted) and pain score, and record the time data was collected. Researchers will also record clinical data from the EMR for the parturient subject or ask the nurses for the data at the time they take these readings (see Data Collection Form).

If parturient subjects request labor analgesia and have an epidural catheter placed, researchers will collect the same data from parturient subjects both at the time that the request is made and within 30 minutes of the catheter being placed. The data collected from these two timepoints is an optional component of the study (see Informed Consent Form). The subjects can consent ahead of time in the ICF but may withdraw consent for these 2 data points and still be in the rest of the study as the data collected at these 2 timepoints are secondary objectives to explore. If a member of the research team is not in the room at the time this happens, researchers will not collect Anxiety, STAI or pain score and will only collect what is available from the charts, as per the Data Collection Form.