Study of the Effect of Music and Meditation on Heart Rate Variability

On Effect of Music

Chiu, H.W. et.al. (2003)studied the anxiety reduction of patients through their HRV data by using the standard methods of SDRR and HF. This study demonstrated that listening to music had influences on autonomic control. Iwanaga,M. et.al.(2005) observed that the LF/HF ratio of HRV increased during SM and EM sessions but decreased during NM sessions. Urakawa,K.,& Yokoyama, K. (2005) also used the same parameter to describe whether music affects the exercise-induced changes in the autonomic nervous system activity in twelve healthy female college students.They showed that ratio of LH/HF of HRV significantly increased with the effect of music. The same quantifyng parameter was used by Peng, S.M.(2009) to study the effect of soft music on HRV. Nakahara, H., et.al.(2009) investigated the differential effects of emotions evoked by music on heart rate (HR) and its variability (HRV) during the playing of music on piano to the persons listening to the same music. The expressive conditions produced significantly higher levels of HR and low-frequency component of HRV, as well as a lower level of its high-frequency component. Orini, M., et. al.(2010) present a methodology for characterizing music-induced effects on the dynamics of the heart rate modulation. They propose three steps- the smoothed pseudo Wigner-Ville distribution for time–frequency representation of HRV; parametric decomposition for robustly estimating the time-course of spectral parameters; and finally statistical population analysis for continuously assessing whether different acoustic stimuli provoke different dynamic responses. Trappe, H.J. (2012). describes that listening to music while resting in bed after open-heart surgery leads to significant differences in cortisol levels between the music and the non-music group. Roy, B., et.al.(2012) describe how rotating acoustic stimulus can change the autonomic balance of the cardiac system. They have used HRV as an indicator of autonomic modulation of heart, both in time and frequency domain. They show that in the Poincaré Plot, SD1,SD2 and the ratio (SD1/SD2) increase after the stimulation. Moreover value of exponent alpha of DFA of HRV is found to decrease. It appears that rotating acoustic stimulus may be beneficial for the sympathovagal balance of the heart.