High blood pressure can lessen your response to classical music, new study finds

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4 April 2025, 09:59 | Updated: 4 April 2025, 10:30

A new study has found that high blood pressure can reduce people’s sensitivity to classical music.

Research investigating the impact of blood pressure on responses to classical music found that individuals with high blood pressure exhibited weaker emotional and physiological reactions compared to those with normal blood pressure.

In the study, published by Vanessa C. Pope, Mateusz Soliński, Pier D. Lambiase and Elaine Chew, 40 middle-aged participants – 20 with high blood pressure and 20 with regular blood pressure – listened to 40 minutes of music.

They listened to playlists of nine versions of eight pieces of Western classical music that had all had their tempo and loudness transposed. During this listening exercise, the participants’ blood pressure was monitored and they were asked how they felt between each piece.

The music was played to participants on a reproducing grand piano called a ‘Bösendorfer VC280 Enspire PRO’, which is able to reproduce each piece exactly with performance-quality acoustics with different tempi and volume.

All the pieces participants listened to were for classical piano due to the genre’s wide stylistic range and musical complexity. The eight pieces included were Prokofiev’s Gavotte, Schubert’s Ständchen, Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 18 in D major, Debussy’s La Cathédrale Engloutie, Chopin’s Nocturne in F-sharp minor and Berceuse in D-flat major, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and the Bach-Gounod Ave Maria.

The study found that elevated blood pressure may impair the body’s natural response to auditory and emotional cues, potentially affecting music appreciation and relaxation benefits.

According to the research, it has already been established that both performing and listening to music can lower blood pressure due to its power to “temporarily physiologically activate listeners”. However, the dynamics of blood pressure during music-listening are not well understood.

Interestingly, the pieces that had been sped up the most were associated with decreased blood pressure in both groups, compared to the slow and medium pieces, performed at their original tempi, which calls into question the idea that slow music is relaxing.

Researchers suggested, though, that this is because pieces of music have a greater physiological effect when experienced in their ‘original expressive performance’.

While music is often regarded as a tool for relaxation and stress reduction, its effects may vary depending on tempo, performance style, and individual health conditions. These findings suggest that high blood pressure could dampen emotional engagement with music, underscoring the need for further research into how cardiovascular health influences sensory and emotional experiences.