Why Singing Is Good For Our Health: Heart Beat Matches Music Beat

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but music may well make it healthier. That’s the opinion of researchers at the Sahlgrenska Academy at University of Gothenburg, in Sweden, who found that the pulse of people singing in a choir tends to increase and decrease in unison. ScienceDaily reports that when researchers tracked the heart beats of fifteen 18-year-olds while they say did three choral exercises (monotone humming, singing the well-known Swedish hymn “Härlig är Jorden” (Lovely is the Earth) and chanting a slow mantra) they found that the music’s melody and structure has a direct link is linked to the cardiac activity, and singing in unison has a synchronizing effect. Why do we care? Because, the researchers point out, the finding could explain why singing has long been thought to be good for our health; and the regulation of heart beat and breath might just be the reason. Read more from ScienceDaily. Read an abstract of the research paper here.