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 self-tracking, 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.

In: Proceedings of Conference on Sonification of Health and Environmental Data (SoniHED 2014)