Music Tempo's Effect on Heart Rate

Introduction Being a college student in this day in age is never easy. We are always on the move and become stressed very easily. One of the ways students deal with the pressure of ongoing assignments, papers, and various projects is to simply listen to music. Music is very popular to our specific age group, but is consuming different styles of music necessarily a healthy alternate to the stress? How does music affect the heart rate and what different types of music have a greater affect on heart rate? Music most definitely has emotional value. Heart rate can be directly influenced by these emotional changes. Our group decided to test music tempo’s effect on heart rate. This experiment is relevant to one’s health because it is important to understand how to control one’s heart rate. Before we started conducting our experiment, we hypothesized that fast tempo music increases heart rates while slower paced music would keep heart rate at a normal level.
Method
The method we used to test our hypothesis was rather simple. We first randomly selected ten people to be our subjects for the experiment. We then took their heart rate while they were in resting position. After the first testing, we let them listen one minute of classical music and recorded their heart rate after. A one minute grace period then went by to let their heart rate get back to normal. We then let them listen to one minute of heavy-metal music and again recorded their heart rate. After all the testing was finished, we then calculated the average change in heart rate between the two different styles of music. Finally, we recorded all the data and constructed a graph.
Results
Table Subject | Resting HR (BPM) | HR after Classical Music | % Change in BPM for Classical Music | HR after Heavy-Metal Music | % Change in BPM for Heavy-Metal Music | 1 | 58 | 46 | 21 | 76 | 31 | 2 | 56 | 42 | 25 | 72 | 29 | 3 | 56 | 46 | 18 | 64 | 14 | 4 | 60 | 54 | 10 | 62 | 3 | 5 | 52 | 46 | 12 | 64 | 23