BEATS OF COLOUR

Beats of Colour was inspired by a project called Heartbeat Topography by Jill Lin. Lin’s project was focused on using the sound of a person’s heart to create an audio visualizer that generated unique landscapes based on the sound input. I was fascinated by her work and wanted to try to do something similar using a person’s heartbeat data as opposed to the sound. My visual inspiration for the project came from two sources, one of which was a TouchDesigner YouTuber’s video about creating simple patterns with 2D shapes. And the other came from past experiences working in OpenProcessing. Throughout the project, my main goal was to find a way for the user to visualize their heart rate in a new and funky way.

Beats of Colour uses a variety of hardware and software to make the project come to life. The setup all began with an Arduino Uno R3 PCB and a PulseSensor heart rate sensor, which connects to the Arduino. The sensor has a small 3d-printed stabilizer (printed by Dr. Yujie Gao) to ensure cleaner data readings. Tatum then modified some of the open-source PulseSensor code included in the Arduino IDE’s example library to sanitize the output of the script, so that it could be integrated into TouchDesigner. Once inside TouchDesigner, Tatum set up a network of nodes to receive the data from the Arduino and record the BPMs. The heart rate data was then fed into her visual network, for which she designed a custom container and wrote a small Python script to control the patterns being displayed on the screen.