Mateusz Soliński, Vanessa Pope, Pier Lambiase, Elaine Chew, Listeners’ baseline autonomic states associated with distinct music-physiology response patterns, European Heart Journal – Imaging Methods and Practice, Volume 4, Issue 1, January 2026, qyag013, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehjimp/qyag013
Mateusz Soliński is now a postdoc at Tampere University in Professor Esa Räsänen’s research group. Here is Mateusz’s LinkedIn post about the article:
I’d like to share the most important article I wrote during my last postdoc at King’s College London, under the COSMOS project led by Elaine Chew. It’s finally been published in the European Heart Journal – Imaging Methods and Practice! 🚀
In that study, we analysed associations between mutual changes in physiological 🫀 and music 🎶 signals during music listening 👂. Rather than comparing simple “before vs. during” averages, we focused on change points in the music—including shifts in loudness, tempo, harmonic tension — and on manually annotated compound events, such as the emergence of a new melody, standout articulation, or harmonic release. (including new melody occurrence, standout articulation, harmonic release and others).
What we found:
– In the general population, the emergence of a novel melody 🎼 and increase in tempo ⬆️ were associated with an increased respiratory rate ⬆️ 🫁 ,
– an increase in loudness ⬆️ and other acoustic features were associated with an increase in HR⬆️ and a reduction in heart rate variability metric ⬇️,
– When we stratified listeners by baseline autonomic nervous system (ANS) state, we observed markedly different response patterns:
a) Individuals with higher parasympathetic tone showed amplified parasympathetic responses to musical change points.
b) Individuals with higher sympathetic tone exhibited further sympathetic activation.
What does it mean?
– The way what was our physiological state before listening is associated with our response to music – this important observation moves us closer to creating safe and individually tailored music-based tools for clinical and everyday use.
– Moments of musical novelty — when something unexpected happens — play a central role in shaping bodily responses.
And the last conclusion: classical music ≠ relaxing music (in most cases). There is a stereotype (sometimes repeated in the literature) that classical music is only meant to relax us. In this study and throughout my postdoc, we sought to communicate that expressive classical music has a rather engaging effect and might induce something like positive stress (eustress). Moreover, it can be used as a safe intervention to study human physiology.
You can find the full text of the article here: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehjimp/qyag013
This article is special to me because I have been working on this experiment for almost three years, including the research design, (long-term) data collection and analysis.
Thanks to all co-authors: Elaine Chew, Vanessa Pope, Professor Pier Lambiase and the whole COSMOS team.
