Heart Beats for Music Hack Day MIT

A project for Music Hack Day MIT 2012.

I got a running watch last Christmas that included a heart rate monitor. I noticed that the range of human heart rates and the range of music tempos are pretty similar, so I thought it would be funny to control the tempo of a song with your heart.

The heart rate monitor communicates wirelessly with the watch. I don't know how to hack the radio signal that the heart rate monitor sends out, so I decided to approach reading the heart rate in a much more roundabout way. I duct taped a webcam to my running watch, and wrote a program in Max/MSP to do some really hacky OCR to determine the digits. I then take this heart rate, divide it by the original tempo of the song, and use that number to control the rate of song playback. Enjoy!

• Category

  Science & Technology

[RobyBang1]

Isn't there a way to control the tempo without affecting the pitch? I know Audacity has a filter that can do this and that program is open source.

[Ryan Challinor]

That's not as funny, though.

[EliteSlayer542]

Not fake and gay. You just don't understand how it works.

[erikolierook]

Can you explain how you did the OCR in max/msp? I want to do something simular; using a webcam as input. thanks in advance

[ClearComplexity]

Image Processing and recognition to get the rate from the monitor and then applying it to the algorithm to control tempo. Great stuff, I'm a graphics student and my programming is all self taught on the side but I usually write most of my stuff from scratch in C++/Python for image processing, I'll have to put some time aside to play with MSP.

Keep up the interesting ideas, mixing some solid technology with humor is always fun.

[Kim Bowen Çolakoğlu]

true, it wouldn't be as funny, but I'm also very curious to hear it without the pitch change. 

[Angeline Yeoh]

Awesome...

[Semih kekül]

I think the system needs a pid controller for preventing peaks. Because it is hard to stabilize heart beat precisely. On the other hand, this idea rocks dude.

[XTdarkgainTX]

geek

[ebenezerkid]

Dude this was awesome!

[Jason Fifield]

who would want to hear her speed up and slow down without chipmunking?

good call on making it all tape-like.

[6u6u7o]

please make another one with normal voice. please, I'll subscribe

[BenMusicien]

You may start using Max/msp, the software is not really as complicate as you think. You don't have to know C++ language at all to use it ;) The software contain a lot of example and there is a lot of tutorial on the internet :D ! I start using it in september with my university, it takes some time to understand the logic of it but that's pretty cool :D ! So go forward!