hear(t) sonifies a person’s current pulse out to the world around them.

The idea is to broadcast publicly a natural, involuntary process that we are habituated to experiencing only intimately and individually. The heartbeat is a private, personal experience.

Technology

A pulse sensor (Polar’s contact heart rate only board, p/n 239025379) registers an individual’s heartbeat. This triggers an audible beat to play from an MP3 player through a flexible speaker (plasma-ion speaker) located at heart level on that individual’s body. Ideally, this project would be one of multiples so that as a group, individuals could hear each others’ heartbeats. This could pose uncomfortable, distracting and potentially revealing exchanges.

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