We are pleased to share our OpEd in Scientific American on How Music can Literally Heal the Heart – www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-music-can-literally-heal-the-heart, which asserts that music’s structural attributes and physiological effects make it an ideal tool for learning cardiology; studying heart-brain interactions; and dispensing neuro-cardiac therapy.
The article was developed from an exploratory seminar on Music and the Heart at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University involving physicians, neuroscientists and musicians with a specific interest in music and its effects on human physiology. It represents the culmination of our collective experiences researching at the intersection of music, medicine, science and technology.
We are grateful to Michael Lemonick for this beautifully presented essay. Embedded in the online article are four videos created for the Arrhythmia Alliance’s Heart Rhythm Congress taking place 3-6 October 2021. The first three videos feature arrhythmia music, including the latest Arrhythmia Suite piece; in the fourth video, Elaine Chew and Pier Lambiase have a conversation on the topic – Music: An underutilised tool in neurocardiology?
Fine work by members of the Cosmos team contributed to demonstrations of CosmoNote and Heart.FM in the final video. Special thanks go to the developers Lawrence Fyfe (CosmoNote) and Charles Picasso (Heart.FM), and to Corentin Guichaoua and Daniel Bedoya for streamlining the computational music feature extraction.
