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ABOUT CARDIAC RESPONSE TO LIVE MUSIC PERFORMANCE

The project Cardiac Response to Live Music Performance explores the connections between music and electric activity of the heart with the aim to understand the pathways that affect mood and heart rhythm. Strong emotions and mental stress have been linked to abnormal heart rhythms that in some people can be dangerous. However, the mechanisms by which emotions destabilize heart electrical activity and cause these abnormal heart rhythms are not well understood. Music induces strong emotions especially at moments of change or transition through violating or fulfilling expectations. We monitor cardiac changes in participants with biventricular pacemakers or ICDs whilst they are listening to live music performance, paying special attention to these moments of change or transitions, to better understand the interactions between emotion responses and heart rhythm. Participants are asked to recall and mark moments of change or transitions, and to rate the felt emotion (only on Study Day 1) tension, on a playback of the recorded performance; they also complete a questionnaire to assess their musical sophistication.

The music used in the study is part of Heart & Music, a public engagement event featuring a concert of music made from stolen rhythms, including from arrhythmic hearts, by Elaine Chew and an introduction to arrhythmia and heart rhythm research, with a focus on heart-brain interactions, by Pier Lambiase and Peter Taggart. The concert features premières of pieces based on ECGs of arrhythmias recorded in electrophysiology procedures at the Barts Heart Centre. The new creations highlight the links between music and abnormal heart rhythms, and make visceral the experience of the recorded tachycardias.