Music Keeps Heart Beats in Tune
June 25, 2009 by Liz Lewis
Filed under Cute Rx, Health, Heart Health
There is something very therapeutic about music. It brings out emotions, makes us want to dance and sing, and soothes and relaxes when you’re weary.
Now a new Italian study highlights the fact that “music induces a continuous, dynamic—and to some extent predictable—change in the cardiovascular system.”
This new study is a follow on from previous studies done by Luciano Bernardi and his team which had found that changes in the respiratory and cardiovascular systems mirrored musical tempos.
To find out more about how the body responds to changing rhythms, they hooked up 24 volunteers – half experienced singers, half with no musical training – to monitors that measure physiological signals. The volunteers were then subjected to five random selections of Bach, Beethoven, Puccini, and other classical artists as well as a two-minute segment of silence.
The results: When volunteers listened to musical selections with a series of crescendos, the monitors recorded a proportional constriction of blood vessels and increases in blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration. The opposition happened happened during decrescendos and the silent periods.
Most interestingly, during periods of ‘rich’ music phrases, such as the famous arias of Verdi, the volunteers heart rates synchronized with the music.
While the study sampled only a small number of participants, it indicates that further research and studies are warranted to explore ways to utilize music in new therapies targeting strokes and other heart conditions.
For further reading on this, check out Scientific American’s article Heart Beat: Music May Help Keep Your Cardiovascular System in Tune.
