This brilliantly simple project uses a heart rate monitor to change the BPM (Beat per minute) of music. The video, which has received nearly 300K views in about 10 days shows the developer Ryan Challinor testing it out to a pop hit CARLY RAE JEPSEN – CALL ME MAYBE. When he starts exercising his heart rate goes up and the music’s speed rises at the same time. when he stops jumping around the music slows down until it becomes annoyingly slow. Check out the video –
Ryan Challinor who is the creator of this project, made it for MIT Hack day 2012 and used the software Max/MSP to write the program. on his Youtube channel he explains:
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.
Max/MSP is a software made by a company called Cycling 74 is a very powerful software and is being used a lot for creative projects such as this. I used Max when I studied at Goldsmiths in 2011 when I created the project Drawing music.
