What would you do if your heartbeat sounded like Mars from Gustav Holst’s The Planets?

The driving, spikey rhythm of Mars from Gustav Holst’s The Planets is probably not the most comforting sound to hear through a stethoscope. A UK scientist, Elaine Chew is analysing the heartbeat patterns of people with arrhythmia – an irregular heartbeat – and turning them into classical music, in what she hopes may become an important diagnostic tool for doctors.

^{Pianist and scientist Elaine Chew. Photo © Brian Morri}

Chew, who is a Professor of Digital Media at Queen Mary University of London and an accomplished pianist, is heading an international team seeking to understand whether musical representation of heartbeat patterns could be used to help doctors and medical professionals identify different subtypes of arrhythmia. The team includes three students at Harvard, Ashwin Krishna, Daniel Soberanes, and Matthew Ybarra.

The project, which was presented at the British Science Festival in Brighton on September 8, takes electrocardiogram data and translates the information using music notation, which then becomes the basis for new compositions, which accurately reproduce the rhythms of the arrhythmic heartbeats. The performance of these compositions will allow...