WED 25 Jun 2025, 4PM, KCL Becket House 5th Floor
Esa Räsänen, Professor in Physics at Tampere University to give talk at Becket House 5th Floor Large Meeting Room as part of the MARC Seminar Series. There will be refreshments after the talk, courtesy of the NMES Research Culture Fund.
If you are unable to attend in person, you may use the following MS Teams link to attend the event virtually: Engineering Seminar — Professor Esa Räsänen
Title: The Science of Timing: Rhythms in Music and Heartbeats
Abstract : Subtle deviations from perfect timing play a crucial role in both musical performance and physiological rhythms. In music, drummers naturally deviate from metronomic precision, producing phrasing structures and long-range correlated microtiming fluctuations that enhance groove and convey human expressiveness. Remarkably, these same principles apply to heart-rate variability, where fine-scale timing variations contain clinically relevant information about cardiac function and stress. Recent advances in time-series analysis have enabled the extraction of meaningful patterns from these timing deviations across both domains. In drumming, such methods capture the “human feel”, and in cardiology, they elevate standard heart-rate data from wearables into powerful tools for early detection, risk assessment, and real-time monitoring.
Speaker : Esa Räsänen is a Professor of Physics and the Head of Physics Unit at Tampere University and an Associate at Harvard University. His research focuses on computational physics, with expertise in quantum mechanics and the interdisciplinary analysis of complex time series, including applications in, e.g., cardiology and music. He has published more than 150 scientific articles, holds several patents, and his research findings have been successfully translated into commercial applications, including advanced heart rate monitoring technologies. His work bridges fundamental physics and biomedical innovation, contributing to the development of data-driven approaches for cardiac health monitoring and music technology.
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