Effects of Listening of "Dengaku" Music (One of Japanese Traditional Music) to the Changes of Heart Rate Variability

To investigate the effects of listening to music, analyses of heart rate variability (HRV) by discrete Fourier transform (DFT) have been widely conducted. These methods are useful to estimate the autonomic nervous system activity (sympathetic or parasympathetic activity). And to examine the effects of listening to “Dengaku” music, one experiment is carried out. Eleven healthy Japanese people participate in the experiment, and one piece of “Dengaku” music is employed as the test piece. All participants are asked to listen to the test piece individually, and their HRV are recorded and analyzed by DFT. The experiment result shows that the sympathetic nerve activities of all participants tend to decrease when they are listening to the test piece. This fact is a rare case (usually, there are some participants whose sympathetic nerve activities tend to increase when they are listening to music). And unique observation (i.e., all LF/HF indexes are decreased), and　common observation (i.e., variation of LF/HF indexes are reduced) are obtained when participants are listening to “Dengaku” music. However, to obtain reliable conclusions, conducting more investigations are especially important.