What Makes the Heart Sing?
On January 28, 2023, Yuja Wang achieved the extraordinary at Carneige Hall: in a single evening, she performed all four Rachmanonoff piano concertos and ““Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini”! Referred to as the Rachmaninoff marathon, this “once in a lifetime” feat pushed both pianist and orchestra to their limits, and left the audience breathless. As a passionate classical music fan and a violinist, I was completely in awe of Yuja’s work with the Philadelphia Orchestra – I had to dive deeper into what made this performance so profound.
What also sets this concert apart is Carnegie Hall’s pioneering experiment: wrist-worn devices captured the heartbeat rhythms of Yuja Wang, conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, members of the orchestra and even the audience throughout the performance. The results, now featured in a fascinating YouTube presentation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuA9l77ODbs), open an entirely new window onto the power of Rachmaninoff’s music. Exploring those heartbeat patterns and what they reveal about collective musical excitement became the subject of my analysis of the concert.
I took screenshots of the YouTube video of heartbeats from Yuja, Yannick, and the audience, and used an AI software (DigitizeIT; https://www.digitizeit.xyz) to convert curves of their heartbeats into (x, y) tabular data as shown in the following figure. For the raw data, I calculated each person’s instantaneous beats-per-minute (BPM), RR intervals (the time intervals between consecutive heartbeats), and heart rate variability (HRV) (the standard deviation of RR intervals, SDRR). A higher SDRR indicates a lower stress level.
Heartbeat Data Pre-processing and Visualization
The results are eye-opening. During Rachmaninoff’s second concerto, Yuja’s most familiar territory, her heart beats at its slowest pace, as if she is taking an easy walk. In contrast, the third concerto, with its soaring dramatic arcs, sends her BPM rocketing. In the lyrical first concerto, her heart races higher than you’d expect from the relaxed tempo. In her interview, she revealed that she is least familiar with this piece. Meanwhile, Yannick’s own heartbeat is lowest during the slow movement of Concerto No. 1, consistent with Rachmaninoff’s poetic calm.
And in Concerto 3, Yuja has a steady HRV and low stress level, despite the piece being the most technically challenging, which speaks to her experience and extraordinary skills.
Lastly, I analyzed the correlation between Yuja and the audience’s heartbeats during the cadenza of Rachmaninoff's concerto No. 3, and found a near-perfect correlation of 0.88 in the first half and 0.91 in the second half! This is proof of synchronization between Yuja and the audience’s heartbeats, and proof of music's power in deeply engaging the audience. Through this analysis, we glimpse how Rachmaninoff’s notes create an invisible bond between artist and audience, a shared heartbeat that turns a performance into an unforgettable experience.
