We’ve known for some time that music is a powerful relaxation tool. Music can decrease anxiety levels, lower blood pressure and heart rate, and change stress hormone levels. It affects your respiration, reduces muscle tension, increases endorphin levels, and boosts your immune system. The effect of music is so powerful, hospitals around the world use music to reduce stress in patients waiting for surgery.

Now there’s fresh evidence on the power of music to affect our health. Researchers at Italy’s University of Pavia recently confirmed that music changes your heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure. But as they analyzed their data, they found something new, something no one had expected to find.

Dr. Bernardi and his colleagues were interested in expanding the use of music to reduce stress in medical patients. Here’s how their experiment worked: the docs recorded the vital signs of 24 test volunteers (12 musicians and 12 non-musicians) for five minutes. Then the volunteers listened to six different styles of music in random order. Random two-minute pauses were inserted in each piece of music.

Here’s what they found: fast musical tempos increased heart rate, blood pressure and respiration. Slow tempos reduced them. Pretty standard stuff. But then the shocker: the style of music and the volunteers’ personal musical preferences made no difference at all. The only thing that mattered was the tempo.

It didn’t matter if the music was classical, rap, techno, romantic or an Indian raga. Only one thing made a difference to their cardiovascular systems–whether the music was fast or slow. This means that the music you hear, whether you’ve chosen it or not, whether you like it or not, is going to affect your health.

There’s more: during the silent pauses between musical selections, the test subjects’ vital signs returned to normal, in some cases stabilizing at healthier levels than before the music. The researchers say this suggests that listening to any kind of music–fast or slow–could benefit your heart.

Finally, the study found that musicians were more sensitive to the effect than non-musicians. Musicians may have learned to breathe in time to the music, to become more alert during fast passages, and to relax when the music slows down. Whatever the reason, a good prescription for helping maintain your cardiovascular health could be to take music lessons.

Art Turner is a musician and the creator of Relaxation Emporium. Want to conduct your own experiment? Head over to www.relaxationemporium.com/music.html. Join our mailing list & get immediate access to two free song downloads–one slow (60 beats per minute) and one faster (100 beats per minute). Find out how your body responds to the beat!

And if you find the flavor of that particular band unpleasant, you simply dump it and move on to the following item on the music smorgasboard line. Either way, the hunger is always there, and the iPod is always prepared, prepared and more than able to try and satisfy it. If you’re an iPod owner, and you find another iPod owner, possibilities are, if you ask that iPod owner for a listen of what’s on their iPod, that iPod owner would be more than pleased to share his audio bounty with you. There’s a common bond between iPod users that directs them to share their music with other iPod users. If you want to be really anti-social you can plug in a portable PA system like the Ion Tailgater PA and share your music with the whole neighbourhood. Now, while contained in a local neighborhood, the choice of songs may be rancid, the global and universal appeal of the iPod presents an unlimited banquet for the ears and the soul.

Eating the same food again and again again, while providing the necessities of life, doesn’t deliver the wonders of it. Listening to the same music time after time again will ultimately tire out the soul and the ears. We need to try, and listen to new things, and the iPod is the perfect global restaurant found on our PCs to go for a sampling!