You'll [heart] this D.J.
One of the early paranoid criticisms of rock music was that its intense backbeat and general loudness had the effect of manipulating the listener's heartbeat. In the telling, this effect took on overtones of something like demonic possession.
Yamaha has a new product, the BODiBEAT, that revives the notion of music's ability to influence the pulsing of the heart, but this time it's a two-way street: the heart, too, affects what music you end up hearing. And the effect is being sold as benign.
Essentially, BODiBEAT is an Mp3 player with the ability to sort songs according to beats per minute, mated to a heartbeat monitor. As you ramp up the exertion in your exercise of choice, faster and faster songs play; as you cool down, the songs, too, mellow.
In marketing the device, Yamaha cites research finding that workouts are more endurable when they're supported with music of a similar intensity. But I'm of two minds here. On the one hand, what runner hasn't gotten up a hill with the help of some hard rock or Jay-Z? On the other, there's something vaguely creepy about this kind of mechanistic feedback. Don't true athletes achieve, or aspire to, a certain mental calm during even the most intense endeavors? Must every fast runner be listening to something frenetic? I'd like to think that some of the people blowing by me on the footpath, doing sub-six-minute miles, have soothing Beethoven adagios playing on their iPods. Or that they might even be listening to (imagine!) their own calm thoughts.
(Image via design mind)
