‘ Pump it Up - insulin pump noises and graph converted to music soundtrack
A Scots academic living with diabetes has created a music soundtrack representing his daily insulin use.
Dr Zack Moir, a lecturer in popular music at Edinburgh Na pier University, who was diagnosed with the condition when he was 17, had been burdened with injecting himself with the drug eight to ten times a day.
But receiving an insulin pump four years ago not only made his life easier, it also provided him with a unique source of composing a highly-personalised piece of music.
A Medtronic insulin pump can upload a user’s data to a computer, presenting it in a series of highly informative tables and graphs.
On studying his own insulin use, Dr Moir saw that the rise and fall of some of the graph lines could re pr es en te lements of music. This gave him the idea of to converting one of the graphs into a music score.
Taking statistics from January 2016– including figures for blood glucose levels, the amount of active insulin in his system, the doses of insulin he gives himself whenever he eats carbohydrate and the total amount of insulin he takes each day – he set about turning these figures into spe - cific pitches.
He then created a track made from sounds that are related to the daily experience of living with diabetes. Dr Moir sampled the sounds of some of his diabetes paraphernalia including that of an insulin phial being struck, the twang of a blood glucose test strip, the beep of a blood glucose meter and the zip of the case that the meter is stored within.
The result was an exp erimental track that represented the ebbs and flows of living with diabetes.
Dr Moir who recently p er - formed the piece at the Royal College of Music in Sweden, said: “The result of the project is an experimental synthesiser type track that a live musi- cian improvises over using a basic score that gives a sketch of the ups and downs of these aspects of the disease. The cumulative effect of the musical components conveys the nature of the physical feelings associated with high/ low blood sugars.
“It is my job, as the soloist in this piece, to make sense of the chaos of the music that is derived from the data and react musically to the sounds produced. Sometimes this is beautiful and tranquil, and other times it is tumultuous and distressing, again, mirror- ing daily life with this unpleasant condition.”
The final track, recorded and mixed in the university studios has been released to stream and purchase with funds going to Diabetes UK.