Autonomic Nervous System

Music is a part of our everyday lives. We listen to music to focus or feel energized when we work, exercise, and go to lively events. In other cases, we use music to relax or clear our minds. In each situation, we are pacing ourselves with the tempo of the songs that we are listening to. Music actually has underlying effects on our bodies that we are not conscious of. When listening to music, the autonomic nervous system and respiratory system are affected. As we receive auditory information about the music, there is a tendency to match our breathing with the tempo of the song, which involves a mechanism between the autonomic nervous system and the respiratory system, called sympatho-respiratory coupling (Watanabe et al. 2015). This utilizes neural links with auditory information being received by the auditory thalamus, which acts as a relaying center of all sensory information to the rest of the brain, and the auditory cortex, which picks up information from the …show more content…
This information is sent to the lateral amygdala and eventually passes it on to the rostral ventrolateral medulla, which is the main site for the regulation of the sympathetic nervous system, directly affecting blood pressure and other cardiovascular responses as well (Watanabe et al. 2015). The medulla contains gray matter that allows it to control involuntary functions of the body, including breathing and blood pressure, and the pons help control breathing with the medulla (Silverthorn et al. 2013). A study observing acoustic tempo on respiratory rate tested these physiological mechanisms and found that with higher music tempos, the heart rate increased in tested subjects, suggesting that the sympathetic nerve is triggered by fast breathing rate caused by fast tempos (Watanabe et al. 2015). A study looking at the effects of different types of music on musicians and non-musicians also found that respiratory rate, heart rate, and blood pressure increased with fast tempo songs (Bernardi et al.