As choir singer's voices sync together in harmony, so do their heartbeats.
Swedish researchers monitored choir singer's heartbeats as they sang in unison, and found their heartbeats begin to synchronize, the BBC reported.
The singer's pulses would begin speeding up and slowing down at nearly identical rates, the researchers have explained the phenomenon with coordinated breathing that comes along with singing in unison.
"The pulse goes down when you exhale and when you inhale it goes up," Dr. Bjorn Vickhoff, from the Sahlgrenska Academy at Gothenburg University in Sweden said. "So when you are singing, you are singing on the air when you are exhaling so the heart rate would go down. And between the phrases you have to inhale and the pulse will go up."
"If this is so then heart rate would follow the structure of the song or the phrases, and this is what we measured and this is what we confirmed," he said.
The researchers observed 15 choir singers performing different tempos of songs, they found slower tunes produced the most vascular synchronization.
Singing often causes the heart to slow down in general.
"When you exhale you activate the vagus nerve, we think, that goes from the brain stem to the heart. And when that is activated the heart beats slower," Vickhoff said.
What Vichoff found particularly fascinating was that the heartbeats synched up extremely quickly. Readings on the heart monitors were all over the place before the song started, but once the choir began to sing the jagged green lines melded into one, NPR reported.
"The members of the choir are synchronizing externally with the melody and the rhythm, and now we see it has an internal counterpart," Vickhoff told NPR. "It's a beautiful way to feel. You are not alone but with others who feel the same way."
The research was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
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