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Music makes your heart beat faster

music soothes

Can music help prevent heart disease? (Image:iStockphoto)

Listening to music can influence your heart rate and how fast you breathe - especially if you're a trained musician, a new study indicates.

The study by British and Italian researchers, which will appear in the journal Heart, shows that listening to music with a slow or meditative tempo has a relaxing effect on people, slowing breathing and heart rate.

Listening to faster music with a more upbeat tempo has the opposite effect - speeding up respiration and heart rate.

The results support a growing body of research on the potential stress-reducing health benefits of music, the researchers say.

Dr Peter Sleight from the University of Oxford reports that other research has shown music can alleviate stress, improve athletic performance, improve movement in neurologically impaired patients with stroke or Parkinson's disease, and even boost milk production in cattle.

Rachmaninov or rap?

In the current study, Sleight and colleagues monitored breathing rate, blood pressure and other heart and respiratory indexes in 24 healthy young men and women, before and while listening to short excerpts of different kinds of music.

The music ranged from slow and fast classical compositions of differing complexities to rap.

They also monitored the subjects during two minute musical intermissions.

Half of the subjects were trained musicians and the other half had no musical training.

The investigators report that listening to music initially produces varying levels of arousal - accelerated breathing, increased blood pressure and heart rate - that are directly proportional to the tempo of the music and perhaps the complexity of the rhythm.

The style of the music or an individual's music preference appears less important than the tempo of the music.

They also found that calm is induced by slower rhythms and by short pauses or intermissions in the music.

Arousal and relaxation

Pausing the music for two minutes actually induces a condition of relaxation greater than that observed before subjects began listening to the music tracks, the investigators report.

Sleight suggests these effects are most striking for people who have musical training because they have learned to synchronise their breathing with the musical segments.

"Musicians breathe faster with faster tempi, and had slower baseline breathing rates than non-musicians," he says.

The researchers speculate that music may give pleasure, and perhaps health benefits, because it induces a controlled alteration between arousal and relaxation.

They say the present study suggests that an appropriate selection of music - alternating fast and slower rhythms interspersed with pauses - can be used to induce relaxation and may therefore be beneficial in heart disease and stroke.

Tags: health, biology, neuroscience