Photo: Brian Morri
Pianist and scientist Elaine Chew makes music out of heartbeats to diagnose arrhythmia.
We’ve written before about how the arts can benefit your health through enjoyment and the exercise of different parts of your brain. Now music is being used diagnostically, to identify the kind of arrhythmia afflicting patients who experience an irregular heartbeat.
Angus McPherson at Australia’s Limelight Magazine has the story.
“The driving, spikey rhythm of Mars from Gustav Holst’s ‘The Planets’ is probably not the most comforting sound to hear through a stethoscope. A UK scientist, Elaine Chew is analysing the heartbeat patterns of people with arrhythmia – an irregular heartbeat – and turning them into classical music, in what she hopes may become an important diagnostic tool for doctors. …
“The project, which was presented at the British Science Festival in Brighton on September 8, takes electrocardiogram data and translates the information using music notation, which then becomes the basis for new compositions, which accurately reproduce the rhythms of the arrhythmic heartbeats. The performance of these compositions will allow doctors and other people who haven’t experienced arrhythmia themselves to gain a more visceral understanding of the condition.
“ ‘Once the heartbeat is represented in a musical score, it can be used to find patterns,’ Chew told the Daily Mail. ‘Right now they don’t relate them to musical patterns. It’s not part of doctors’ training. But it is part of every musician’s training. We notice timing.’
“ ‘The reason I came up with this idea is because I was an atrial fibrillation patient myself,’ Chew said in an article published on the Queen Mary University of London’s website. ‘I was about to have my ablation procedure, and when the senior registrar heard I worked in digital music, he told me about a quiz he had organised for his cardiology colleagues.
“ ‘He said he played different types of electronic music of varying tempos to them, and they had to guess the type of arrhythmia that the music most resembled,’ she explained. ‘And so that got me thinking. After my surgery, I requested my own ECG data from the consultant, and started my analysis.’
“Chew and her team have already created an Arrhythmia Suite, of music based on the rhythms of irregular heartbeats.”
More at Limelight, here.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 
My husband has atrial fibrillation so i find this especially fascinating!
Oh, my goodness! And he’s also a musician, so he might understand how it works better than I do.