General clarifications: [1] We started with recordings of the heart's electrical activity, not with sounds of heartbeats. [2] The music representations, more precisely the time structure representations, will help in signal analysis. [3] The music compositions give life to the time representations, allowing people to experience the time information they encode; they are not a necessary part of the analysis.
Related blogposts:
■ Daily Mail (UK): Spot problems early by turning your heartbeat into MUSIC (12 Dec 2017)
■ Science Donga (Korea): Early arrhythmia diagnosis by 'Arrhythmia Suite' (Nov 2017)
■ Sciences et Avenir (France): L'arythmie cardiaque pour composer au piano (3 Oct 2017)
■ Smithsonian Magazine (USA): Turning irregular heartbeats into music (22 Sep 2017)
■ MailOnline (UK): Scientist turns the sound of irregular heartbeats into classical music in the hope of helping doctors better diagnose the condition (15 Sep 2017)
• Musical America (USA): Composing from the Heart(beat) (22 Sep 2017)
• M-magazine (UK): Music based on Irregular Heartbeats Could Help Doctors (21 Sep 2017)
• Limelight (Australia): Music made from heartbeats may aid arrhythmia diagnosis (20 Sep 2017)
• Classic FM (UK): A pianist is composing classical music from irregular heartbeats, to help diagnose patients (20 Sep 2017)
Blogposts describing the music and arrhythmia project:
• Radcliffe Project Update and Seminar (19 Jul 2017)
• Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study 2017 Summer Fellowship (13 Jun 2017)
Source: inews.co.uk/essentials/news/pianist-created-novel-way-help-heart-patients-using-music
This pianist has created a novel way to help heart patients using music
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Professor Elaine Chew was in hospital about to undergo a heart operation when she was inspired to
investigate whether ECG data could be translated into music (Photo: Brian Morri)
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Sunday 17 September 2017
Beating her heart condition at its own game?
Elaine Chew, an accomplished pianist and music professor at Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL), has experienced irregular heartbeats, or arrhythmia, since childhood. This time last year she was so ill she couldn’t walk down the street without stopping to rest. Now, she has developed a novel approach that could help patients with heart conditions like hers.
What does it involve?
Translating electrocardiogram (ECG) data from patients into a sheet of music.
Intriguing – but is she well enough to work?
The academic, who was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, the most common form of arrhythmia, which raises the risk of stroke five-fold, underwent a successful operation last November and is in good health now. It was while she was in hospital recovering that she came up with a way to help treat patients.
What happened?
Professor Chew was chatting with a medic when the doctor mentioned in passing a Christmas quiz question he’d come up with to test his colleagues’ know-how. The cardiology expert, Dr Jem Lane, researched music with rhythms similar to different types of arrhythmia and challenged his colleagues to guess the heart rhythms the pieces most resembled.
And that sparked an idea?
Yes. Professor Chew realised that it could be possible to harness music to offer better treatments to patients with irregular heartbeats. Currently, heart rhythms are recorded with an ECG. Cardiologists study the data closely – with their eyes – to diagnose a patient and suggest treatment.
What did Professor Chew suggest?
That the data could be treated as a digital record of the “symphony” performed by the heart. She enlisted a team of researchers to translate ECG data into music which can be performed by any player and listenrd to by anybody.
How does that help?
“Translated into music, everyone can have a better idea of what arrhythmia feels like for a patient.” the academic told an audience at the British Science Festival in Brighton. More importantly, this approach could reveal hidden patterns in ECG data, which can be used to divide patients into finer categories so that they can receive more personalised treatment in the future.
Is her theory being put into practice?
Professor Chew’s consultant cardiologist, Dr. [Correction: Professor] Pier Lambiase now collaborates with his former patient on her research. “At the moment, nearly 40 per cent of patients do not respond to the standard treatment that we offer,” he said. “We need to develop new approaches, like the one Elaine is pursuing, to improve our categorisation of the patients and offer more individually tailored treatment to give better care.”