An Attempt to Pulse Wave Analysis to Listening of “Nishi-ure Dengaku” Music (One of Japanese Traditional Music)

Abstract

To investigate the effects of listening to western music, analyses of pulse waves by discrete Fourier transform (DFT) have been widely conducted. These methods are useful for estimating autonomic nervous system activity (sympathetic or parasympathetic activity). And to examine the effects of listening to “Nishi-ure Dengaku” music (one of “Dengaku” music (Traditional Japanese music)), one experiment is carried out. Eleven healthy Japanese people participated in the experiment, and one piece of “Nishi-ure Dengaku” music is employed as the test piece. All participants are asked to listen to the test piece individually, and their pulse waves 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 observations (i.e., all LF/HF indexes are decreased), and common observations (i.e., variation of LF/HF indexes are reduced) are obtained when participants are listening to “Nishi-ure Dengaku” music. Moreover, it is suggested that a repetition of a particular rhythmic pattern may influence sympathetic nerve activity and reduce it by comparing the experimental results of this paper and the author’s previous study. However, conducting more investigations would be especially important to obtain reliable conclusions.