How does music make your Heart “beat” ?

Hello blog! Long time no see! I promise I have not been idle however these passed few weeks as you will soon learn.

Ever since last quarter, my classmates and I have been working on designing and performing an experiment. So here is the run down of what we did and how 😀

HeartBeat ❤

First of all our assignment was…. design an experiment with the heart. Okay….. Pretty broad topic… But we managed to choose an area that we felt would interest most people. Music.

What does music have to do with hearts, you ask….? That was exactly what we were going to find out. I will give you a run down

Problem: How do different genres of music affect heart rate and blood pressure?

Now that we had a problem we had to think of how to solve this problem. We first chose 8 songs of different genres to play for the experiment-ee while continually tracking their blood pressure and heart rate. Here is a list of the songs we chose:

country— If I didn’t have you by Thompson Square                    pop– Teenage Dream by Katy Perry                                                 oldies— Build me up Buttercup by The Foundations

children’s music— John Jacob by ?

hymns— Onward Christian Soldiers

Techno– Angel in the Night  by Basshunter

rock– Misery Business by Paramore

Rap— Some horrible song by HYFR

**disclaimer** I do not recommend listening t most of these songs.. they are actually quite horrible. I do not know who picked them

Anyway moving on…

Hypothesis: We predicted that while listening to music genres of the country, oldies, hymn, and children variety, the heart rate and systolic blood pressure would

Procedure: So we set out on our musical adventure and found out that first, the heart rate monitor was a pain. But we worked through. We also learned that listening to the same songs for two weeks, kinda gets old. But that is beside the point. Using a blood pressure cuff, the Logger Pro app, some hand held heart rate monitors, and a lot of patience. We collected some very interesting data… This graph is an example of the graphs we made of our data.

I know it looks like just a bunch of lines… But when compared to other graph we were able to create a conclusion!

Conclusion: Aside from the fact that Shelby should get a pacemaker put in…or maybe not drink as many energy drinks… We were able to conclude that music does have some affect on the hearts beating rate and blood pressure. We were in correct with some of the genres we picked for this to happen (for example, rock music actually let the heart work less not more as I had predicted) but there were very obvious changes in the heart none the less.

Here is a picture of the poster we made to document our journey **another disclaimer** I had nothing to do with the glitter or the “Ludzy” hmmm..:

This can be seen on a wall down a hall in a school. (hey, I can’t make this too easy)

Overall, I really enjoyed this project! I really think that it was a good start to a good idea. If I were to do it over again there are some changes I would make though. First, I would make sure to pick better music. Second, I would only choose 4 songs, and then hopefully be able to test more people then just 5. Third, I would restrict the data collecting to only heart rate. Possibly doing a separate experiment with blood pressure. Sometimes the all of that data at one time became overwhelming and was hard to understand. However, I am very pleased with the end result…. and I am happy that the conclusion almost lined up with my hypothesis! Maybe I’m not too bad at this scientist thing after all….