Janet L Jones, PhD

I mentioned in my last post (# 114) that True relaxes to easy music, as many horses do. He also is calmer in indoor arenas with gentle music because it masks or softens the strange little noises that indoor arenas make. Scientific studies support the claim that easy music relaxes horses—it’s even been shown to improve their performance. But True and I use music in several ways other than relaxation, too.

One of the basics that young horses must learn is to travel at consistent pace. In other words, we don’t want the horse to trot thirteen long fast steps then four short slow steps at unexpected moments, or canter at randomly varying speeds the way most greenies do. I used many different ways to teach True consistent pace, and one of them is music. As you might have already guessed, there are brain-based reasons for this.

Music can be purchased or streamed according to beats per minute. For example, I find Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s cover of the Bruce Springsteen song “Blinded by the Light” to represent the perfect snappy medium posting trot at 141 beats per minute (bpm), given my height and the size of horse I typically ride. The Bee Gee’s “Stayin’ Alive” has been used for decades to hold the pace of a good jumping canter at about 104 bpm. You can google the bpm of your favorite songs and eperiment with one or two to find the perfect pace for your needs. Then create a playlist of your own, or search for a pre-recorded 140 bpm playlist on a streaming service like Spotify or Pandora.

Once you’ve got the songs, they can be played aloud or via headphones depending on your needs. Playing them aloud in an arena has the advantage that the horse can hear them too. But so can everyone else in the arena. Other riders might not feel like practicing canter pace when you do. And they might hate “HandClap” by Fitz & the Tantrums even though the bpm matches a show ring trot.

Headphones overcome those problems but must be used only when you are alone in an arena. A lot of unfortunate collisions and near disasters occur when riders sharing the same arena plug up their ears with private music. Yell “heads up” as you approach a jump, and they won’t hear you. Say “loose horse” after a longe line breaks, and they’ll ride unwittingly into the mayhem. Ask everyone in the arena to halt because a child just fell off, and they’ll gallop merrily along, endangering the child. If you decide to use headphones, be sure you are alone in the arena.

I don’t recommend music on trails either, because there are too many other important sounds riders might need to hear. The sound of a gunshot in hunting season, for example, the chatter of the squirrel your horse is going to shy at, or the whoosh of a mountain bike racing up behind her tail.

Once you’ve got a safe plan in mind, turn on your bpm-selected music and pick up the gait for it. Then time your horse’s step or stride to the beat of the music. Of course, it’s possible to simply feel consistent pace, but it’s much easier to hear small inconsistencies than to feel them.

There’s a neurological basis for that—human brains are better at hearing pace than feeling it. Because of this human brain bias, most beginning or intermediate riders have trouble identifying the moment that a horse’s pace begins to slow down or speed up. They don’t notice until the horse is moving much too quickly or slowly, and then it’s a much harder problem to solve. But using music, they can catch the inconsistency in the first two or three beats and fix it immediately. Try it sometime… alone, please!