Elaine Chew presents 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.
Photos by Thomas D Wright
COVID-19 Heart Transplant Patient and Medical Team(2021) generated/visualised by Emma Fridwith 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
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.
Elaine Chew gives keynote on music and cardiology at the Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg / Universität Mozarteum in Austria at 18h00 CET on 17 March 2022.
