BPM Speaker

A speaker that plays music to the speed of your heartrate

By making a speaker that only played music at the speed of our heart rate, it generated discussion over how our bodily cadence impacts the way we perceive our surroundings.

A slow steady heartbeat makes for unhurried perception of time, but too slow of a heartbeat and it makes for a sedating experience that warps all that is around us. A rapid heartbeat makes for speedy behavior, but too fast and it can cause things to spiral out of control.

It is a metaphor for how technology has been shaping our realities: self-amplification and distortion. 

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I used arduino and a pulse sensor to prototype these speakers, and performed its function in a Smart Object’s performance on Twitch. I rendered the speaker design on Shapr, Rhino & Keyshot.

The mechanism of this speaker leans into reinforcing feedback loop theory, the more extreme the input gets (in this case the heartbeat), the more extreme the output delivers (in this case the playback speed of music). At its threshold, something needs to intervene to release the build up, and introduce a mediator to balance the feedback loop. This is true for every reinforcing feedback loop. 

This experiment wants to identify that mediator within us – can we find it within our human bodies to pull out of this self-multiplication? Where technology presents alluring and irresistible gratification, are we able to localize what it is about our human lives that remains irreplaceable and true? What about our physical body is able to cut through the delicious “fat” that is offered through technology, and remind us of our humanness?