The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2022–2023
Heartchild's CHD-4 drum machine plays children's real heartbeats — D&AD Black Pencil 2023
A charity built a modular synth from the irregular ECGs of four children with heart defects, so anyone can make music with their real heartbeats.
The Swedish Heartchild Foundation
What it had to solve
The Swedish Heartchild Foundation, a small charity for children with congenital heart disease, needed awareness and donations for a problem that is invisible until it hits a family. Around 2,000 Swedish children are born with heart defects every year, yet public knowledge stays low.
How it works
The Swedish Heartchild Foundation is a small charity for children born with congenital heart disease and their families. In Sweden about 2,000 children are born with heart defects every year — the most common congenital defect — yet knowledge of the problem stays low, and a small foundation cannot buy its way into the public's attention.
The foundation, creative agency Abby.World and designer Love Hultén turned the condition itself into the message. With teenage engineering they built CHD-4, a modular drum machine whose sequencer is driven by the real electrocardiograms of four children — Liv, Vincent, Janiyah and Wega — each born with a different heart defect. The machine plays their actual, irregular heartbeats, as if the instrument itself had arrhythmia.
Musicians including alt-J, Amason and Elin Piel made songs with the machine, and the one-of-a-kind instrument was auctioned at Stockholms Auktionsverk with all proceeds going to the foundation. The idea put the problem directly in people's hands: anyone could experience what it sounds like when small hearts do not beat normally.
Why it lands
- It translated a medical condition into a tangible, playable object instead of statistics, so empathy happened through the senses.
- Using real ECGs from real children made the cause personal without exploiting the children — their heartbeats became the artwork.
- Partnering artists like alt-J and an auction house gave a tiny charity cultural weight it could never have bought.
- The machine works as both a fundraising object and an ongoing awareness device, since every performance of it re-tells the story.
What it did
The condition became tangible: musicians across Sweden recorded 'Heartbeat Sessions' with the machine, it was auctioned at the world's oldest auction house for charity, and the work won the D&AD 2023 Black Pencil for Product Design, gold at the Swedish Design Awards and a Guldägget nomination — putting a tiny charity's cause on the global creative stage.
What you can take
Give people the problem to hold, not statistics about it: when a medical condition becomes something playable and beautiful, empathy does the communicating that awareness campaigns cannot.
Since then
Launched on World Heart Day 2022, the campaign ran through a February 2023 charity auction at Stockholms Auktionsverk, with all proceeds going to the foundation. It won the D&AD 2023 Black Pencil for Product Design, gold at the Swedish Design Awards in October 2023 and a Guldägget nomination. The foundation said interest was broader than expected and that music and art made the problem feel closer and more personal.
Sources
- Heartbeat Drum Machine — D&AD Awards Archive
- Ljudet av ett hjärta (The Sound of a Heart)
- These Are the 2023 Winners of D&AD's Most Coveted Pencils
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