Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" set to heart beat for Music Hack Day at MIT

By: Will Goodman
Topics: Winning!

(CBS News) When science and pop culture collide, your blogger here gets super excited. Guess what? I am super excited right now! Seriously, stop whatever you're doing this instant and watch the song you know so well get its tempo set to the beat of a heart in the above experiment.

The fascinating video that has pop music and science collide was done for the recent Music Hack Day at MIT by programmer Ryan Challinor who writes about the project:

I got a running watch last Christmas that included a heart rate monitor. I noticed that the range of human heart rates and the range of music tempos are pretty similar, so I thought it would be funny to control the tempo of a song with your heart.

The heart rate monitor communicates wirelessly with the watch. I don't know how to hack the radio signal that the heart rate monitor sends out, so I decided to approach reading the heart rate in a much more roundabout way. I duct taped a webcam to my running watch, and wrote a program in Max/MSP to do some really hacky OCR to determine the digits. I then take this heart rate, divide it by the original tempo of the song, and use that number to control the rate of song playback. Enjoy!

Paint us here at The Feed impressed with this amazing video that has earned a big triple-rainbow salute of geeky cool science, and gotten our heart rates way up, Ryan! And if you'd like to check out more projects by Ryan Challinor, you can visit his YouTube page by clicking here.

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