Concerts Music

Muse Meets Medicine: Transformation: Sounds of Illness and Healing at Barts’ Great Hall

March 20, 2026June 20, 2026E CComment(0)

Elaine Chew presented her arrhythmia music and Emma Frid’s heartbeat sonification at the Performance: Key Changes, Medicine, Music, and Transformation which featured sounds and images of disease and healing at the Great Hall of St Bartholomew’s Hospital on Tuesday, 17 March. Transformation was the closing event of Muse Meets Medicine, a two-day festival of arts and the human dimension in healthcare.

COVID-19 Heart Transplant Patient and Medical Team (2021) generated/visualised by Emma Frid with Michele Orini, Giampaolo Martinelli, Elaine Chew

Music and heart signals share key characteristics: both have an innate periodicity and time-varying structure, making heart signals well-suited for mapping to musical sounds. In this work, heartbeat measurements from a heart transplant patient and the medical team in a COVID-19 unit are portrayed through sonic and visual representations. The piece explores concepts such as synchronization and entrainment, the process by which independent rhythmic systems interact, sonically highlighting how a medical team comes together during treatment. By mapping the relationship between the spectral components of the heart signals of the patient versus the team to harmonic tension in music, an ensemble of six voices moving in and out of sync is created, drawing parallels to how singers in a choir synchronize their heartbeats when performing together. Sounds are mapped so that greater coherence (degree of correlation) between heart signals in the group results in louder and more consonant sounds. In the visualization, each person is represented by a colored heart on a dedicated row, with the patient at the top. Due to their medical condition, the patient’s heartbeat is the fastest. With each heartbeat, hearts shift to the right, their sounds following along through panning, and their color reflecting how closely each person’s heart signal aligns with the patient’s. ~ Emma Frid

0:00 Introduction by Giampaolo Martinelli
3:21 Toggle Dance and Pulse Dance by Rob Godman and Kate Romano
18:14 I See You, I Hear You by Mark (Hun Sik) Lee
24:55 Elysium by Seb Harcombe, Max Keeble, Lucinda Lloyd
43:19 Little Etudes for Piano by Elaine Chew
53:52 Arrhythmia Suite I (with HeartFM heart-breath visualisation) by Elaine Chew
59:02 Heartbeats of COVID-19 Heart Transplant Patient and Medical Team by Emma Frid, Giampaolo Martinelli, Michele Orini, Elaine Chew
1:02:24 Close by Caroline Hamson

Other performances included electroacoustic music (Toggle Dance and Pulse Dance) by Rob Godman and Kate Romano, actors recounting experiences of Coming Out of Coma by Seb Harcombe, virtuosic violin impressions of emergency room sounds (I See You, I Hear You) by Mark (Hun Sik) Lee.

Programme Notes

The performances were accompanied by an exhibition of paintings of surgery images by Thomas D Wright in the Henry VIII Room.

Muse Meets Medicine was organised by cardiothoracic anaesthesiologist Dr Giampaolo Martinelli (Barts Hospital), Professor in Medical Education Louise Younie (Queen Mary University of London), Dr Giskin Day (Imperial College London), Professor Christine Bentley (Missouri Southern State University), and Megan Tjasink (Barts Hospital & Queen Mary University of London), with support from Caroline Hamson and team of Barts Heritage.

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