By identifying how listeners synchronise their heart to expressive features in music, the team step closer to music-based heart treatments.
New findings on how the human heart adapts to expressive music features, like loudness or tempo, could lay the foundations for targeted music-based "exercises" to support heart health.
Led by King's College London, the study published in the European Heart Journal: Imaging Methods and Practice, suggests that listeners synch their body's involuntary responses, like heart rate, blood pressure and breathing, to objective arc-like phrase structures found in music.
By identifying the structures that listeners entrain these responses to, the group hope to design music that can exercise heart rate and blood pressure. This would engage the autonomic nervous system responsible for these functions, like exercise does, providing a potential route to rehabilitation for immobile or at-home cardiovascular patients.
Combined with earlier work that categorises objectively how an individual's underlying nervous system state may influence how the body responds to expressive music changes, the team believe they are closer to designing individually tailored music-based health treatments for the heart.
In the future we could select or create music that encourages your heart muscles to flex, aiding cardiac fitness... Music could be used to keep their heart pliable and elastic, supporting rehabilitation and heart health."
Natalia Cotic, PhD Student
Natalia Cotic, a PhD student at King's College London and first author of the paper, said "Previously, a lot of work has been done about how individuals respond to music or how they may be affected by it at a base level. What distinguishes our work is the objectivity and granularity the results suggest; we can chart how hearts align over time with musical phrases.
"By leveraging this, in the future we could select or create music that encourages your heart muscles to flex, aiding cardiac fitness. This could be a gentle cardiovascular workout for those with mobility issues or in post-operative recovery. Music could be used to keep their heart pliable and elastic, supporting rehabilitation and heart health."
To measure the level at which listeners' hearts entrain to expressive musical motifs, the team recreated a 2009 experiment, gathering 12 choristers and 12 non-choristers to listen to opera excerpts while their heart rate, blood pressure and breathing were monitored.
Departing from that study, they then asked each listener to note down the points in time when they thought the music had a phrase boundary that separated one phrase or part of music from another, and compared this against expert notation that objectively marked where the piece had in fact gone through those shifts.
The researchers found that the participants' physiological changes aligned more closely to the objective boundaries as opposed to the subjective ones. This suggests that a music's objective performed structures, not people's perception of it, that plays a key role in shaping cardiovascular and respiratory rhythms.
Work like this could facilitate understanding of the genesis of heart rhythm disorders and alternative strategies for promoting resilience to rhythm disturbances."
Professor Pier Lambiase, Professor of Cardiology at University College London and Barts Heart Centre
Working in conjunction with recent research by the group which categorised how the body's baseline nervous system could predict how changes in music would impact the body, the team
hopes that these more objective measures will shape non-pharmaceutical precision heart treatments at scale.
Commenting on the clinical relevance of this work, Professor Pier Lambiase of Barts Heart Centre and senior cardiologist-collaborator said, "Music affects the heart and the brain, and is a universal and dynamic medium enabling study of heart-brain interactions. Work like this could facilitate understanding of the genesis of heart rhythm disorders and alternative strategies for promoting resilience to rhythm disturbances."
Professor Elaine Chew, Director of the Digital Music Theranostics Laboratory at King's and senior author said "The body is complex and so is music, and it's been hard to say definitively what in music invokes these types of bodily responses - until now. This work sets out objective music- and physiology-based biomarkers for interactions between music and the heart in an otherwise difficult and often subjective field.
"Ultimately, that provides promising and scalable frameworks for non-invasive music-based health interventions. This is an exciting time to be working in the field."
