Researchers are learning how music can help improve heart health. Image credit: Vinzent Weinbeer from Pixabay
High blood pressure? A heart app prescribes musical therapy
Europe has gone from thinking music could stop plagues 400 years ago to realising it can help prevent cardiovascular disease today.
31 January 2023 | By ANTHONY KING
The opening of a Beethoven symphony thrills the heart – but not just figuratively. While music touches us emotionally, it stimulates the heart physically and can lower blood pressure.
More than one in five people aged 15 years and over in the EU have reported having high blood pressure, which can lead to failure in the heart, kidneys or brain. Lowering blood pressure even slightly can reduce the risks of cardiovascular disease.
Heartfelt tunes
From the Science and Technology of Music and Sound Laboratory in Paris to King’s College London, Professor Elaine Chew is developing an app for smartphones to boost heart health as part of an EU-funded project called HEART.FM.
‘We’re creating an app that will monitor people’s response as they listen to music and then tailor that music to benefit them,’ said Chew, a professor of engineering at King’s who collaborates with St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London.
The app uses measurements of the person’s heart and artificial intelligence algorithms to create a listening regimen that regulates blood pressure.
While HEART.FM stands to help people today, another EU-funded project called GOING VIRAL looks back at how public perceptions and uses of music in Europe have evolved through the course of disease outbreaks over the past four centuries.
In the 17th century, music was believed by many people in Europe to have the power to stop or even prevent an outbreak of the plague, according to Professor Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild, who leads GOING VIRAL and is a musicologist at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.
The two projects show music’s influences on human emotions through the ages and how its emotional power is now being harnessed through modern technology.
Personal perspective
Chew has a personal connection to HEART.FM. She had suffered from an irregular heartbeat, which was successfully treated. The experience made Chew conscious of her own and others’ heart health.
‘Medicine made it possible for me to have a much better quality of life and it led me to rethink the purpose of what it is I do,’ she said.
We’re creating an app that will monitor people’s response as they listen to music and then tailor that music to benefit them.
Professor Elaine Chew, HEART.FM
A professional-level piano player herself, Chew has since 2018 studied how people’s hearts respond to music, starting with patients who have pacemakers.
A pacemaker is used to treat some abnormal rhythms – called arrhythmias – that can cause the heart to beat too slowly, too fast or irregularly. The pacemaker enables a patient’s heart to beat regularly by sending electrical pulses to it.
Chew and colleagues at St Bartholomew’s Hospital discovered some good news: the recovery time between beats of the hearts of people with pacemakers could be modulated by music. In general, quicker recovery times signal stress, while longer ones indicate relaxation or calm.
hew is drawing on the findings of her work involving pacemaker patients to develop the HEART.FM app for a much broader group of people.
‘People enjoy music as a pleasurable pastime – the difference here is that we are monitoring how the body responds,’ she said.
HEART.FM’s goal is to fingerprint the cardiovascular responses of people listening to music. Chew often hooks up students to the testing device and then sends them data from the app so they can see their own physiological response to music.
The app in development would be downloaded onto a smartphone by users to track their heart’s rhythmical responses to music and to guide them on a therapeutic path to lower blood pressure. The plan is to make the app globally available for download from app stores.