Elaine Chew presented Heart & Music: Stolen Rhythms at the MIT Killian Hall on Sunday afternoon, 17 November 2019—a vanguard to the exploratory seminar on Music and the Heart at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. As part of this concert event, Pier Lambiase, co-organizer of the Radcliffe seminar, UCL Professor of Cardiology and Director of Electrophysiology Research at the Barts Heart Centre gave an introduction to arrhythmia and research at the BHC before the Arrhythmia Suite.
Many thanks to Eran Egozy for hosting the event, Kathy Cafferty for the elegant website, and Tom Amos for the cool poster.
Here are some concert snippets captured by an audience member who has kindly shared them:
Full set of photos (by Daniel Bedoya and Ronni Schwartz) from Sunday afternoon can be viewed at bit.ly/heart-and-music-mit-photos.
Heart & Music emerged from a larger study on Cardiac Response to Live Music Performance led by Chew, Lambiase, and Taggart. The study, covered in a BBC World Service Health Check program, explores heart-music-brain interactions, and involves patients with biventricular pacemakers / ICDs—intra-cardiac readings are downloaded from the muscles of the patients’ hearts whilst they listened to some of the music featured in this concert.
The music featuring stolen rhythms included Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s Stolen Rhythm and Chew/Child/Grønli’s Practicing Haydn bookended by the original Haydn Sonata movement and Jonathan Berger’s Intermezzo, MorpheuS (Dorien Herreman’s computer program) pieces based on music by Bach and Kabalevsky, and Chew et al.’s Arrhythmia Suite based on rhythms from ECG recordings of ventricular tachycardia from the catheterization laboratory.
