Music engagement is pervasive and pleasurable. It has profound effects on the body and the mind. Autonomic reactions to music like changes to heart rate and blood pressure can be harnessed to alleviate the global scourge of heart disease, the number one killer, and its foremost risk factor, hypertension. But why and how music works on cardiovascular variables remain mysterious and undissected, limiting its robust and systematic use in medical diagnostics and treatments. The ephemeral quality of music and the highly personalised nature of music reaction makes targeted use of music complex and challenging.
Our approach leverages knowledge about music expressivity, the prosody of music communication. Linking expressive music features continuously to cardiovascular measures, we stratify physiological reactions to prosodic structures during music engagement. Autonomic tendencies precipitate cardiovascular disease, and heart disease impacts autonomic response. Our methods use music reaction characteristics for both diagnosis and for personalisation of music-based interventions.
HeartFM started as a European Research Council Proof of Concept project, HEART.FM : Maximizing the Therapeutic Potential of Music through Tailored Therapy with Physiological Feedback in Cardiovascular Disease, awarded in April 2020 to explore therapeutic and societal potential of methods developed and trialed in the ERC project COSMOS : Computational Shaping and Modeling of Musical Structures. It links physiological feedback with computational music structure analysis to provide personalized music listening therapy to achieve targeted autonomic nervous system responses.