B.P.M. (Beats Per Meditation)

Narrative Description:

B.P.M. consists of two pads, one held by one person between their fingers, and the other held by another between theirs. These pads read their heartbeat and turn it into dance music, making drums and hand clap sounds beat with their heart. How fast their hearts beat also affects other layers of the music as well. They can use this in any circumstance they want. They might want to calm down and meditate to the music in a dark room. They might just want to have fun and share an experience with each other.

Progress Images:

(1. A temperature sensor sending data into Arduino. Initially I was planning on using temperature as another metric for getting biometric data into the system, but ultimately, these ended up not being usable, as they are slow to change temperature and require a lot of skin contact to even start reading skin temperature accurately. Perhaps a different kind of temperature sensor designed more specifically for skin would have worked better.)

(2. Another picture of the temperature sensor, and you can see, even with a large amount of skin contact, the temperature reading of the sensor only got up to around 90 degrees Fahrenheit. So, not too accurate for my intentions.

(3. An initial use of the pulse sensors. This is with just one of them so I was able to plug it directly into the Arduino Uno. You can see the LED light very clearly on this one. As well as this I have it connected to a velcro strip on the back. This might have been useful, but I found holding it between two fingers to be more stable.)

(4. A demonstration of the pulse data going into the Serial Plotter in the Arduino IDE. It is very clean in this picture! Which is surprising in hindsight, as the data ended up being a lot noisier.)

(5. An initial test sketch I made in Arduino to send two different values into Max. You can see here I was just testing two random values. The interpretation of the data from serial was the most intimidating aspect of developing this project.)

Process Reflection:

In a way, this project fulfills a long-standing desire of mine to learn how to get interesting data from the outside world into Ableton. I’m always looking for new methods of control, and this project gave me insight into how to design new kinds of instruments, for example. Although the idea is simple in concept – take heartbeats and convert them into musical data – this turned out to be a lot more complicated than I initially realized.

In my initial idea of the piece, I was going to use the “Connection Kit” device on Ableton’s website, which is preconfigured to work with Arduino, no extra application of coding needed. This uses the Firmata protocol, and unfortunately, the nature of the pulse sensor is that to get any meaningful data out of it, a lot of signal processing needs to be done. By itself, mapping the pulse data to a musical parameter is an interesting modulation waveform, but I wanted the heartbeat itself, or the BPM. These are things that needed to be calculated and to do that I needed to do a lot of extra coding. Fortunately, I was able to figure out how to just pass the data into Max/MSP, which is designed to work well with MIDI in particular. But before that revelation, there was a lot of unclarity with how to do this. I actually bought an Arduino Leonardo, which I ended up not using, but I had an idea for a while to turn the Arduino into a USB MIDI device to just send notes directly to Ableton that way.

I am also glad I was pushed to make the project more complex, which gave me the idea to make this for two people instead of one. I think the idea of meditating with TWO people, and the intimacy that creates is a lot more interesting than what I would have done with just one person.

Code Submission:

Arduino

// B.P.M. (Beats Per Meditation)
// William Lamkin
//
// This takes data from two pulse sensors and sends it
// over serial to be processed in Max MSP.

const int PulseIn1 = A0;
const int PulseIn2 = A1;

long Sig1 = 0;
long Sig2 = 0;

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
  pinMode(A0, INPUT);
  pinMode(A1, INPUT);
}

void loop() {
  Sig1 = analogRead(PulseIn1);
  Sig2 = analogRead(PulseIn2);

  Serial.print(min(Sig1, 800));
  Serial.print(" ");
  Serial.print(min(Sig2,800));
  Serial.println();
  delay(50);

}

Compressed Max patch (copy the whole thing to clipboard and in Max, select File>New From Clipboard)

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</code></pre>

——————————————————————————————–

The heartbeat sensors ended up being finicky in that they didn’t allow a user to move their hand at all, almost necessitating extreme stillness. Thankfully this benefitted the goal of the project to encourage meditation. However, because of this, the other sensor element of this project, the temperature sensors, proved unfeasible. The temp. sensors required a lot of skin contact to raise the reading higher. Because of this, the hand positions required for both sensors were incompatible and the temp. sensors ended up being dropped.

Draft statement: B.P.M. (Beats Per Meditation) is a device for use with Ableton Live and Max/MSP that uses two pulse sensors connected to an Arduino. These pulse sensors use the real heartbeat of two people to trigger percussion in Ableton Live, while also calculating their BPM to modify other sound parameters, like the brightness of a synth pad. The resulting music is a kind of a trance music, generated by the body. This device asks the users to focus and meditate on their body through the sound, and share that experience with another person. Hopefully, they will be able to calm down from whatever they are experiencing and have some new insight about themselves.

As an electronic musician, I have always been interested in incorporating new modes of interaction with music. Biometrics seemed like an obvious avenue for exploration, and something like dance music, which already has influence from the beat of a heart, fit the bill perfectly. As well as this, I thought it would be extremely useful to integrate the new technology I had been learning with Arduino, with software tools that I was already familiar with. This is the result of these experiments.

Bill of materials as of right now:

Laptop with speakers (have)

Ableton Live (have)

Arduino Uno (have)

2x heart sensors (on their way)

2x temp. sensors (on their way)

• Arduino (already have)
• Computer/speakers (already have)
• Ableton Live (already have) + Connection Kit (free download)
• • Or Max/MSP (already have)
• Two pulse sensors such as this heart rate sensor
• Two temperature sensors such as this LilyPad Temperature Sensor