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)
■ iNews (UK): Pianist created novel way to help heart patients using music (17 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: www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4887168/Musical-scientist-turned-arrhythmia-classical-music.html
Scientist turns the sound of irregular heartbeats into classical music in the hope of helping doctors better diagnose the condition
• Scientist with a musical background has turned irregular heartbeats into music
• Elaine Chew at Queen Mary University has analysed the beats of arrhythmias
• This inspired a set of piano pieces based on the rhythms called Arrhythmia Suite
• The music will help doctors to better recognise different sub-types of arrhythmia
By COLIN FERNANDEZ SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 15:37, 15 September 2017 | UPDATED: 16:57, 15 September 2017
An irregular heartbeat – potentially warning of a fatal heart attack - is not the sort of sound most people want to hear.
But now a scientist with a musical background has turned the sound of disordered heartbeats into classical music.
Elaine Chew, Professor of Digital Media at Queen Mary University, London and colleagues has analysed irregular heart patterns – called arrhythmias.
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| While a typical heartbeat is a regular, ba-domp, ba-domp, people with arrhythmias can have more unusual rhythms |
They are not entirely random – and to a classically trained musician’s ear, they can sound reminiscent of the rhythms of famous pieces of classical music.
For instance, when Dr Chew listened to one pattern of heart arrhythmia it reminded her of Mars by Gustav Holst from the Planets Suite.
Dr Chew argues that by grouping certain rhythmic patterns together, and making them into music, may help doctors to better recognise different subtypes of arrhythmia, where at present they do not see any difference.
Dr Chew, an accomplished pianist, became interested after she was diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat herself, said: ‘Once the heartbeat is represented in a musical score, it can be used to find patterns.
‘Right now they don’t relate them to musical patterns. It’s not part of doctors’ training. But it is part of every musician’s training. We notice timing.’
Cardiac arrhythmia afflicts over two million people in the UK alone. It is caused by faulty electrical wiring in the heart. While some irregularities can be fine, others can be deadly.
Dr Chew, and three students at Harvard University, Ashwin Krishna, Daniel Soberanes, and Matthew Ybarrra used anonymous electrocardiogram data from St Bartholomew’s hospital in London.
One piece of music inspired by electrocardiograms is Arrhythmia Suite, a set of piano pieces based on the music of patients with various heart conditions.
Dr Chew said that the recognition that the human heart was like a musical beat was recognised more by science in the Middle Ages.
‘That fell out of favour, and we’ve not made the connection so much in recent centuries.’
Asked if there was a particular piece of music that we should be worried about if our heart pattern sounds like she said:
‘Pretty much anything. If it was Beethoven’s Fifth, for instance, it would be very bad. You would be dying.’
The research was presented at the British Science Festival in Brighton.
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| Elaine Chew, a scientist at Queen Mary University, has used her background in classical music to turn the sound of irregular heartbeats into a musical score |
Read more:
Elaine Chew, research