Elaine Chew gives a lecture on Music and the Heart: A Math-Tech Perspective on 19 October 2022 at the Sir John Manduell Research Forum Series of the Royal Northern College of Music. The lecture was hosted by Emily Howard, Director of the Centre for Practice & Research in Science & Music (PRiSM). The centre is co-directed by mathematician Marcus du Sautoy (Oxford) and computational scientist David De Roure (Oxford, The Alan Turing Institute), who was also present at the talk. The RNCM YouTube channel livestreams the Research Forums. The talk announcement and YouTube recording are re-posted below.
Music and the Heart: A Math-Tech Perspective (Prof. Elaine Chew, King’s College, London)
Music and heartbeats share many similar properties; connections that enable musical thinking and representations to be applied to heart signals. Music has also been employed in every stage of cardiovascular healthcare, for example, as intervention for raised blood pressure, pre-operative anxiety, and post-operative recovery. Here, we shall explore if music could potentially be a tool for studying and understanding cardiovascular disease. I shall present a series of examples of research at the intersection of music and cardiovascular science, representing a journey spanning music representation of abnormal heart rhythms and music-based modulation of the cardiac autonomic nervous system. These studies are made possible by parallel research on music expressivity and the modelling of structures musicians create in performance. Applications of the music-cardiovascular research include digital therapeutics and medical education.
* The results presented are part of the projects COSMOS and HeartFM that have received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement Nos. 788960 and 957532).
References
Putting (One’s) Heart Into Music – https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehab108
How Music Can Literally Heal the Heart – https://bit.ly/sciam-musicheart
