Steffen Schmidt

Swiss artists-in-labs Programm 2011
Service de Chirurgie Cardio-Vasculaire, Centre hospitalier universitaire vaudois CHUV, Lausanne, www.cardio-vascular.chuv.ch

Artistic Background:
Project title: Signs of Life
Website

The project is a research on heart-beat between scientific and artistic approach. In cultural history the heart has a central place as the place for emotions and ethics, as well as it is the centre of the organism, the pumping motor in anatomy. For musical theory it is the orientation for musical tempo. But it is even more. As the language of emotions, a composition, especially in classical music, is building up the inner movements of the organism, the acceleration and the retardation not only by exterior movement (like dance and acting), but also by interior movement, which becomes measurable through the heartbeat.

Strange enough, music is not well examined in approaches to emotion research, nor is the heart beat well examined for musical theory. The first step of this project is a comparison of the ways a scientist is listening to the phenomena of heart diseases, announced through  a special sound (like “holosystolic murmur”), the way the scientist is translating it into an expression of language, and the way a musician is describing it by measuring into bar units and accents.