This case study centered on the effects of Music Therapy (MT) on vegetative state (VS) patients for a continuous 41-day experiment with electrocardiogram (ECG) recorded. Mahler's Second Symphony was used for this MT. There are various elements in Mahler's second symphony, with string, wind, drum, and even voice; providing the subject a strong and dynamic stimulation. There are some significant changes after 14-day stimulation: both standard deviation of all normal RR intervals (SDNN) and root mean square successive differences (RMSSD) in heart rate variability of the subject increased, indicating the activity of the cardiovascular system was enhanced. Although there's only one subject in this experiment, the results are still encouraging.

How the musical tempo affects the performance of heart rate variability (HRV) was studied in this work. By understanding the relationship between the HRV response and the music tempo with decreasing tempo from 140 to 70 beats per minute (bpm) periodically in six successive weeks. There were two groups in the experiment, one was listening drum loop music 3 minutes in the middle of experiment and the other was just rest for 20 minutes. After the processed the information from the objects, the distribution of difference of HRV response between before and after listening various tempo drum loop was similar to the distribution of modern popular music in tempo. Both distributions have the twin peaks about 70-85 and 110-125 bpm.