The Effect of Music Genre on Heart Rate

Though music has been used as a pain and stress reliever since the early 1700’s, people are just recently beginning to conduct in depth research on how it affects the brain, why it changes emotions, and how it can solve medical problems (“History of Music Therapy”). The experiment in this paper focuses on how different genres of music can change heart rate and also emotions by measuring the changes in heart rate.

For the experiment, songs were selected from four genres of music, which were classical, jazz, rock, and dubstep. Originally it was hypothesized that the rock and dubstep songs would result in an increase in heart rate and the classical and jazz songs would result in a decrease in heart rate. To conduct the experiment, a participant filled out a short survey asking for their gender, age, and a ranking of their favorite to least favorite of the four genres of music. After this, the resting heart rate was recorded and averaged to find the average resting heart rate and, during each of the songs, every change in heart rate was recorded and averaged to find an average heart rate throughout the songs. After analyzing the data, it was concluded that the heart rates did not change significantly for dubstep, classical, or jazz. However, with a p-value of 0.0264, rock showed a significant increase in heart rate. Song preferences were also taken into consideration, and it was found that favorite and least favorite songs did not significantly change heart rate.

Using the results from this experiment, scientists and doctors can further their awareness of how music genres affect people in different ways, but further research would need to be conducted to truly determine if music plays a role in affecting heart rate.

Research Conducted By:

Gabriella Kennerly
Lakeview High School

Logan Schmitt
Lake Shore High School

 

 

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