Effects of excitative and sedative music on heart rate.
... music decreased heart rate (Iwanga and Tsukamoto 1997). However, other experiments have concluded that music can increase a person’s heart rate, whether it was excitative or sedative (Iwanga and Tsukamoto 1997). An investigation done on older people showed that both types of music decreased the heart rate (Reznikov et al. 2000). The purpose of this particular experiment is to find the effect of excitative and sedative music on the heart rates of two similar subjects. My hypothesis is that heart rate of the subjects will increase when they are listening to excitative music and decrease when they are listening to sedative music. Another possible outcome is that listening to both types of music will increase the heart rate, because it is a stimulus. The third possible outcome for this experiment is that the music will not affect the heart rate of the subjects at all, as hypothesized by Fontaine and Schwalm. “From what I can gather, the tempo of the music does not affect the heart rate (Fontaine and Schwalm 1979).” Materials and Methods I set up the experiment where two subjects, age 23 and female, were hooked up to heart monitors and were given headphones that were connected to a portable disc player. I tested them one at a time, however. Each of them was blindfolded, in order to minimize the possibility that distractions around them would affect their heart rate. I wanted them to be able to focus solely on the music. Before they began listening to the music, I simply let them sit in silence for one minute, in order to determine their average heart without any stimulus. This average heart rate is what I would measure the results against. Once I had the average heart rate, I turned on the sedative music and measured the heart rate of each subject over the course of one minute. The sedative music was “Just Like We Do” by Eisley. After this was recorded, I turned off the music again, completely, for one minute and let their heart rate regulate again. I did this regardless of any deviations in heart rate from the previous music. Then, I turned on the excitative music and measured the heart rate over the course of two minutes. The excitative music was “Ocean Avenue” by Yellowcard. Music does appear to affect heart rate to some degree. However, my results are somewhat inconclusive. Though the heart rate of my subjects varied, they did not follow the pattern that I expected them to. I expected the sedative music to relax the subjects and, therefore, to decrease their heart rate. The first subject’s heart rate was decreased by the sedative music, but the second subject’s heart rate actually rose. This could be because of varying musical taste. “The hypothesis that heart beat was a pacemaker of personal tempo was supported by results from Fraisse” in 1982 (Iwanga 1995). Essentially, this means that people have an innate preference for music based on the tempo of their heart rate. The variances in natural tempo preference and taste in music could have been a factor in the differences between subject one and two. Su...