Harmonizing Health: Elaine Chew Explores the Music and Heart Connection

Winner Interview 2023: Art & Science

As the music and heart connection captivates human experience, Elaine Chew delves into the fusion of music computing and cardiology research. Breaking barriers, her work unravels music's impact on the heart, unveiling therapeutic potentials. By decoding music's expressivity and its physiological effects, Chew's interdisciplinary exploration offers insights into music's role in cardiovascular health, heralding a new era of music therapeutics.

Which wall does your research break?

Music and the heart have been romantically linked through the ages. More recently, physicians have been interested in music-induced changes to the heart and breathing for clinical use in modulating stress and blood pressure. However, understanding music's effects on the heart is challenging due to the contextual, personal, and specific nature of music responses, making findings inhomogeneous and hard to explain. Furthermore, music expressivity—the intentional manipulation of sounds to touch listeners—is ineffable and ephemeral, lacking a systematic vocabulary for its description. As part of our long-term research on the why and how of music expressivity, we have created models to characterise and visualise performed and composed music structures. This research breaks down the barriers to describing the ineffable nature of music by representing performers’ expressive shaping of musical prosody and how listeners and performers perceive it. Additionally, by superimposing performed and composed music structures to understand the reasoning behind decisions, we break down the barriers to explaining the why and how of expressive decisions. By adding visual layers of concurrent physiological information from wearable sensors, we can see and learn the effects of music on the heart and human physiology. Thus, we break down the barriers to understanding music’s effect on the heart for potential clinical use in cardiovascular therapies.

What inspired or motivated you to work on your current research or project?

I was a patient undergoing curative ablation procedures for heart rhythm disorders. Twice. For different arrhythmias. Apart from the obvious benefits of the treatment, I was drawn to the images and signals inside the catheterisation laboratory. I figured I did not need to wait for a third call to start applying my music computing skills to cardiology research. Initially, I devised a way to transform arrhythmia ECG into music sequences sampled from existing music that mirrored the rhythms exactly—while on the table in the cathlab. This was inspired by an exchange with a cardiologist in training, who told me he had chosen music of different tempi for their Christmas party’s guess-that-arrhythmia game. I knew we could do better: we had already generated music with borrowed rhythms, and music information research (MIR) arose from a need to retrieve matching or similar music. This led to music pieces matching arrhythmia ECG provided by the consultant cardiologist and his engineer. The success of the mapping means that we can use MIR techniques to characterise and categorise abnormal heart rhythms, opening up new avenues for arrhythmia diagnostics. We embarked on this current research because, ultimately, the consultant, Professor Pier Lambiase, was more interested in treating patients and in how adverse emotions precipitate dangerous cardiac arrhythmias—they had studied this in the cath lab using a stressful film clip. Independently, we had also worked on film and emotion, but with music. As a musician and engineer, I have further worked to deconstruct the mechanisms by which performers shape music expressivity to move listeners. Thus, rather than using a harrowing movie clip, we can turn to music to induce cardiac responses in ways that are highly quantified. Thus, we began working together to investigate music’s effect on the heart.