What is it about?
We looked for every study we could find that recorded brain activity and heart activity at the same time while people listened to music. Eighteen met our criteria, across five databases. Ten of the eighteen used historical or formalised classical music. Not one of the eighteen papers mentions using pop, which is what most people actually listen to. All eighteen recorded both signals at once, which is the difficult and expensive half of the work. Only a small subset then analysed the two in relation to each other, so most reported the brain and the heart as separate results sitting side by side.
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Why is it important?
Each signal on its own is ambiguous. A change in brain activity might be the music or a general shift in arousal, and a change in heart rate might be emotion, or breathing, or the person shifting in their chair. Recorded together, one can be checked against the other. That is the whole reason for going to the trouble of recording both. So the obvious question, how the brain and the heart respond together to music, has largely not been asked of data that has already been collected. Answering it does not need new equipment. We also found that method reporting was patchy. 83% did not report electrode impedance, 61% did not say how the music reached the participant, and only 28% gave loudness in decibels. Without those details another lab cannot repeat the study.
Perspectives
I came to psychology from music. I trained in music and music education and played in bands for years, so the question of what music does to the body has been with me for most of my life. Before designing my own experiments I wanted to know what had already been done, and this review is what that search turned into. The part I did not expect was where the gaps come from. EEG research has its own reporting guidelines, cardiac psychophysiology has its own, and music research has conventions for describing the stimulus. A study at the intersection has to satisfy all three at once, and few people are trained in all three. Our own team spans music research and psychophysiology, and even between us the review kept turning up terms one discipline takes for granted that another reads differently.
Scott Leimroth
University of Wollongong
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Exploring
EEG
and
ECG
in Music Listening: A Scoping Review, Psychophysiology, September 2026, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/psyp.70385.
You can read the full text:
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