How does singing affect your heart rate

And it helps to explain how and why music therapy works see "Singing — and striding — stroke survivors". Music therapy can help stroke survivors recover their ability to speak and move. The reason lies in music's widespread effects on the brain, which cultivate a process known as entrainment. Entrainment refers to the simultaneous activation of neurons from different parts of the brain.

After certain types of strokes, people can't move the muscles in their tongue or lips dysarthria and therefore aren't able to speak clearly. But asking them to "sing" a familiar song using simple syllables such as "la" or "fa" instead of words helps entrain their motor or muscle-activating nerves, which helps them recover their speech.

The technique works for all types of movement. When stroke survivors practice walking to music, it helps steady their gait and improves the speed, symmetry, and length of each stride. Music can also alter your brain chemistry, and these changes may produce cardiovascular benefits, as evidenced by a number of different studies.

For example, studies have found that listening to music may. Like other pleasurable sensations, listening to or creating music triggers the release of dopamine, a brain chemical that makes people feel engaged and motivated. As Harris points out, "An exercise class without music is unimaginable. Sound processing begins in the brainstem, which also controls the rate of your heartbeat and respiration. This connection could explain why relaxing music may lower heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure — and also seems to ease pain, stress, and anxiety.

But preference matters: research suggests that patient-selected music shows more beneficial effects than music chosen by someone else, which makes sense. According to the American Music Therapy Association, music "provokes responses due to the familiarity, predictability, and feelings of security associated with it. In the cardiac stress test study done at a Texas university , most of the participants were Hispanic, so the researchers chose up-tempo, Latin-inspired music.

In the artery relaxation study, which tested both classical and rock music, improvements were greater when classical aficionados listened to classical music than when they listened to rock, and vice versa.

That seems a bit overly dramatic to me especially the bit about relaxing waves through the choir. But it's clear that the heart rate variability is more in sync during singing, and that this is probably due to the synchronous breathing.. There are some things about the study that I think could have been done better. The pieces they picked to sing were well known, and also both slow and relaxing. One was "Fairest Lord Jesus", which is a pretty typical hymn.

Give me some Vittoria's O Magnum Mysterium any day. The other thing they were required to sing was a meditative repetition. While these are both fine, they are both at the relaxing end of the spectrum for tempo.

And not just tempo. The hymn is well known and probably positively associated for the people who were singing it, and the meditation was the phrase "just relax". Both of these things are probably really What if they had to sing something that was slow Like Lotti's Crucifixus or Mozart's Lacrimosa?

Not only that, if group singing at a slow pace caused slower heart rate variation If so, then maybe only singing the hymns is really good for you. I would have been interested to see them test this with new songs the participants were not yet exposed to, say teaching them a new song to sing together, or maybe having them learn a new song alone before coming in to sing it together in the lab.

Songs that people didn't already know might be a better test than songs they already know I also think they should have tried with a mantra that Neutral words at least, in an effort to get rid of suggestion. The numbers tested only 18 were heart monitored are also pretty small, probably they could have gotten better results with a larger number of people. The mantra produced pretty high synchronicity, but the hymn, much less so. Larger numbers might have helped this.

I also noticed that there weren't really any statistics to compare one task to another. The statistics were listed in the text, but I would have liked to have seen the graphs comparing the different conditions, so I could see more clearly what they were comparing. Also, The authors measure breathing in a small subset of 5 and heartrate, and conclude that the breathing that is in sync is causing the heart rate variability to sync up as well.

That may be true, but you can't really prove the cause there. But actually, there is an easy TO prove the cause. You need to have the group sing, divide them up into two or more groups Do the participants' heart rates sync up with similar breathers and not with dissimilar ones? That would help show that the breathing is indeed the cause of the heart rate sync. The authors also talk in the discussion about how the group singing might have promoted a "we" perspective through group action, as the people were all singing the same piece.

While that might be the case, the study definitely did not address how the people FELT about their collective sense of purpose or sense of "we". All p -values are corrected for multiple comparisons. HRV coherence per condition for the case study. Each panel depicts the coherence as a function of frequency in a condition gray curves represent the individual coherence, black lines the average across subject pairs.

The hymn has phrases of two, four, and eight bars which lead to 0. The dominant frequencies that are shared across subjects show up as coherence, particularly at 0. Due to the non-sinusoidal appearance of the HR fluctuations Figure 9 , harmonics at 0.

In the mantra, the coherence is high at 0. There is no strong coherence at any frequency during the hum and baseline conditions. Coherence and phase score curves for individuals in gray and mean across subjects in solid black.

The coherence score at each time point and for each pair of subjects a point on the gray curve is computed as the most significant coherence in each rolling window of length 96 s, stepped by 12 s.

The phase lag at the frequency of the most significant coherence constitutes the phase score. The coherence score top panel is clearly high during the mantra and hymn. There is a steady and decreasing phase lock during the mantra and to some extent during the hymn bottom panel.

The top panel of Figure 12 simply illustrates the coherence score evolution for the duration of the study. The phase score is computed as the phase between subject pairs at the frequency of the most significant coherence. Figure 12 clearly shows that phase alignment is not present during humming or baseline. However, the striking result is rather the phase lock present during mantra singing. Visually, the phase lock can be deduced from the near parallel horizontal phase score curves during the mantra.

There is possibly a slight tendency that the phase scores are approaching zero no phase shift , thus suggesting that if we had prolonged the mantra singing all the hearts would have been totally synchronized in HRV phase and frequency. Interestingly, this tendency continues 1 min after the singers have stopped singing, to be brutally interrupted when the subjects start reading in the baseline condition. This shows that music structure is paramount to HRV phase and that the hearts of the five participants tend to accelerate and decelerate simultaneously during hymn and especially during mantra singing.

Since the song phrases affect breathing and since breathing affects HR, the structure of the music affects HRV. This is illustrated in Figure RSA is defined as the coherence between respiration depth and HR.

We depict the average RSA across subjects in rolling windows of length 96 s, stepped by 12 s. Each column represents the coherence at different frequencies for a given time point and each row the coherence for a particular frequency across time.

RSA is markedly high during the mantra at 0. RSA is also high during the hum segment, albeit not a common dominant frequency as expected since respiration frequency is highly individual during humming. The brighter fields in the figure show that RSA is strongest in the 0. The hymn condition shows weaker RSA but it can clearly be detected, mainly in the 0.

Due to the limited sample size, results are not significant when comparing singing conditions. Visual inspection of HR-respiration coherence, however, clearly indicates markedly different RSA patterns for the different song structures.

This is especially evident from Figure HR-respiration coherence for individuals gray curves for each condition. Average HR-respiration coherence is shown in black. RSA is defined as significant and high HR-respiration coherence. Notice the narrow frequency band for which RSA is observed during hymn and mantra singing. By contrast, humming is associated with RSA in a range 0.

The figure identifies the frequencies that are linked to RSA during each of the conditions. During baseline, RSA is lower than during any form of singing. Humming is associated with RSA in the range 0. By comparison, RSA is narrowly focused to particular frequencies for all subjects during hymn and mantra singing, predominantly at 0. Taken together, these results show that the structure of the song determines respiration which in turn causes simultaneous acceleration and deceleration of the hearts of singers.

The group and case studies both suggest that singing increases HRV. For simple song structures, like humming and mantra chanting, the impact on HRV is especially marked in terms of high and regular amplitude variation a dominant HRV frequency. When the music singing structure is regular, HRV profiles tend to conform between singers in terms of frequency and phase.

Since music structure guides respiration for singers, the fact that HRV reflects music structure can be explained by RSA. This means that there is a clear tendency toward an entrainment effect between singers in terms of HR acceleration and deceleration as soon as they sing a simple structure in unison. As stated earlier, RSA is associated with vagal influence and self-reported well-being. Singing can be viewed as initiating the work of a vagal pump, sending relaxing waves through the choir.

Singing, and especially upbeat energetic singing, is at the same time arousing, since every activity and particularly physical activities are arousing. The assessment of finger temperature and skin conductance in this study did not, however, show significant sympathetic activity.

This result could be interpreted as a vagal dampening of sympathetic activity. In other words, there was probably sympathetic activity but it was leveled out. The combination of sympathetic and vagal influence reflects the fact that these systems can act independently Paton et al. It has been suggested that the mental state of flow Csikszentmihalyi, may be such a combination De Manzano et al. One of the characteristics of flow is focused interest during maintained control Snyder and Lopez, This suggests sharp attention and action potential in a calm state.

Stephen W. Porges, argues in his Polyvagal Theory that social engagement demands a calm, unthreatened state combined with arousing motivation to participate Porges, These functions, Porges emphasizes, are all associated with the myelinated vagus emanating from the nucleus ambiguus Porges, As he also points out, this nucleus not only communicates with the heart but also with laryngeal vocal cord muscles via the recurrent branch of nervus vagus to the effect that ANS status is audible in human emotional prosody Porges, Thus, music communicates the ANS state between singers in two ways: the vagal pump and an audible cue.

From the perspective of joint action Sebanz et al. Entrainment between two dancers, for example, depends on analogue representations of rhythm stimulated by the music in their nervous systems. It is tempting to reverse this logic and consider how synchronized internal events affect external action. Choir singing coordinates the neurophysiological activity for timing, motor production of words and melody, respiration and HRV.

It has been proposed that joint action leads to joint perspectives Vickhoff, and joint intentions Pacherie, In this context it is interesting to note that synchrony rituals benefit cooperation Wiltermuth and Heath, ; David-Barrett and Dunbar, In other words, singers may change their egocentric perspective of the world to a we-perspective which causes them to perceive the world from the same point of view of for example religion, politics or football team and thus defining who we are.

This touches on the fundamental question of why music is a universal phenomenon. Unlike most other universal human behaviors there is no self-evident Darwinian explanation.

The American cognitive musicologist David Huron, though, has proposed that music stimulates the production of the neuropeptide oxytocin and thus strengthens bonding Huron, Since group bonding has a survival value, this might explain why we have music, he argues. The question of music and oxytocin is complicated. Venous oxytocin can be obtained, however.

We have tested this in our laboratory for various types of music without indications of unambiguous oxytocin level changes. On the other hand, oxytocin level increase has been observed after singing lessons Grape et al. Be it as it may, if collective singing creates joint perspectives, it would indeed be bonding in the deepest sense.

The vagal effect of breathing is, as pointed out, an ANS reaction. It is hardwired and thus universal. It could therefore be expected that various cultures use this technique wherever people gather to achieve relaxed communicative states.

Interestingly, coordinated respiratory activity, irrespective if it is caused by yoga breathing, mantra chanting, praying or singing is ritually performed in most religions.

This is a common factor, more so than the semantic content of beliefs. The emWave tool used in the group study does not have the necessary time accuracy to determine phase in HRV. For this reason we could only show frequency compliancy but not determine phase compliancy.

We therefore added a complimentary case study, which clarified the mechanisms and allowed us to follow respiration in combination with HRV. Would the results in this study have been different if we had reversed the order of stimulus presentation? Since we had 1 min baseline non-singing between singing conditions, we could clearly see that there was no lingering HRV effect in the baselines from preceding conditions. We therefore draw the conclusion that the order of presentation would most likely not affect the results.

This study consists of two parts: a group study and a case study. We did not make any comparisons between the group and the single cases. The case study involved taking respiration rate and HR measurements from single cases.

However, the other case subjects were also participating in the singing during the measurements. In the future it would be very interesting to do test the hypothesis that there is a difference in neurophysiological variables if you sing alone or in a group.

Our study suggests that people who sing together tend to synchronize biologically in various respects. Eighty percent of the neural traffic between the heart and the brain goes from the heart to the brain.

The natural question is how this affects the behavior of individuals and their perception of the world during singing and after.

Does choral singing produce a common perspective? How could such a perspective be manifested and measured? Could it be that runners tend to synchronize respiration to the steps, or to imagery melodies which creates a slower paced breathing and thus affect HRV? This may make the circulatory system more efficient and thus produce distance or speed at lower energy costs.

So far, neuromusicology has mainly been concerned with cortical and limbic activity, but this study rather stresses the importance of the ANS system for music perception, production and communication. How music affects this system has broad implications for stress reduction therapy and motivation.

We explain how the length of the song phrases guides respiration, resulting in compliances of frequencies and phases of respiration cycles and HRV cycles between singers.

Singing produces slow, regular and deep respiration which in turn triggers RSA. This causes a pulsating vagal activity which, together with sympathetic activity, is interpreted in context of Porge's polyvagal theory of communication. The findings potentially explain the role of collective singing in the creation of joint perspectives. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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