🔆 Midsummer Special: AI x Music 🎶

🗞️ Issue 23 // ⏱️ Read Time: 8 min

Hello 👋

With a couple of Scandinavians in team Lumiera, we are counting down the days to Midsummer. This is the time when the sun never sets, and it’s celebrated with flower wreaths, schnapps, pickled herring and… music! This is the simple reason for our focus on melodies, rhythms, tempo and harmonies this week.

Music and human beings: A love story

The human relationship with music goes a long way back. 

Studying fossils shows our ancestors had the physical capacity for vocal music over 530,000 years ago when they developed the hyoid bone. Charles Darwin speculated that human language abilities may have originated from singing and our innate pleasure in music. While the exact origins are unknown, the ubiquity of music across cultures suggests it emerged very early in human evolutionary history, likely predating language.

Rapid changes in music consumption

Our consumption of and the way we listen to music has changed dramatically:

Do you remember when portable cassette players were the thing? Or when downloading the latest torrents on Limewire, Napster and The Pirate Bay changed the way we could access music. If we were to guess, the latest piece of music you listened to was probably through a streaming service, like Spotify.

The music streaming industry is heavily based on data and AI, and the changes have had some big consequences: Increased music consumption, shifts from ownership to access, personalised music discovery, increased mobility and accessibility as well as change in revenue models. Technology hasn’t only changed the industry, but also the music. Creators like William Onyeabor made groundbreaking music through new technology, and now services like Suno and Warpsound are changing the game for creators once again. But more about that another time. 

Today, we are going to talk about music and data from a different point of view: How scientists are exploring ways to heal the body through music.

Can our body heal through music? 

Some believe that Beethoven included his own irregular heartbeats into the dotted rhythms of his 'Les Adieux' Sonata. In other words, his heart rhythm disorders might have influenced the unique rhythms in his music. Metaphorically, music has for a long time been intertwined with the heart. Now, we are getting to a point where we also can show that this is the case scientifically. 🫀

The leading cause of death worldwide and in the EU is cardiovascular disease. In other words, finding ways to improve heart health is a big deal. Especially is it’s done through music, as it offers non-pharmacological, non-invasive, scalable, and pleasurable ways to alter our heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, and heart rate variability, with few, if any, side effects. The Pianist, Researcher and Professor of Engineering, Elaine Chew, is studying how the heart responds to music. Team Lumiera had the opportunity to exchange a few words with her and learn about the work that Elaine and her colleagues are doing.

By applying music computing skills to cardiology, the research basically shows what’s going on behind the scenes: It allows for more precise modelling of music mechanisms and the way that it affects the heart. In other words, the music experience is decoded and linked to a physiological response. By doing so, evidence is gathered for music’s effect on the heart.

AI algorithms can process large datasets of physiological signals such as heart rate, blood pressure, etc. recorded while people listen to different types of music. This allows AI to model and learn the complex patterns of how music influences these vital signs. Rather than simply mapping abnormal heartbeats to music compositions (which is currently considered to have limited therapeutic value), AI is uncovering the underlying mechanisms of how music can regulate cardiovascular function.

Want to see how this works? The research team at King’s College London created an app to demonstrate how music affects the heart. This is done in real time while the music is being played. The app is called heartfm. It visualises heart data (both for those who perform the music and those who listen to it), such as:

🫀ECG , 🩺 Beat-to-beat heart intervals, 🫁 Breathing, 💗 Heart rate variability 

That’s the science lesson for today. Now go find some Scandinavians, pick some flowers and listen to Midsummer music.

Glad Midsommar! 🌸 🎼

Until next time.
On behalf of Team Lumiera

Emma - Business Strategist
Sarah - Policy Specialist
Allegra - Data Specialist

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