Acoustic Sonification of Blood Pressure in the Form of a Singing Bowl

The Hypertension Singing Bowl is an Acoustic Sonification shaped by a year of blood pressure data that has been 3D printed in stainless steel so that it rings. The design of the bowl was a response to a medical diagnosis of hypertension that required regular self-tracking of blood pressure. The culture of selftracking, known as the Quantified Self movement, has the motto “self knowledge through numbers”. This paper describes the process of designing and digitally fabricating a singing bowl shaped from this blood pressure data. An iterative design research method is used to identify important stages of the process that include the choice of a sonic metaphor, the prototyping of a CAD baseline, the mapping of data to shape, and the acoustics of the mapping. The resulting Hypertension singing bowl is a meditative contemplation on the dataset that is a reminder to live a healthy lifestyle, and a poetic alternative to generic graphic plots of the Quantified Self.