Perfect your cardiac auscultation skills with Heart Songs!
The Heart Songs audio product is designed specifically to help you learn in the way that your brain processes auditory information so you can quickly and easily master basic, intermediate, and complex heart sounds.
Each audio file within Heart Songs includes 200 repetitions of its murmur. Simply listen to each file 2 to 4 times to effortlessly master each one!
Cardiac auscultation has traditionally been taught as if it were an intellectual skill, with a didactic lecture followed by a brief demonstration of heart sounds. This approach has yielded disappointing results, with most clinicians able to recognize only about 40% of abnormal heart sounds. Heart Songs, on the other hand, is based on psychoacoustic research demonstrating that intensive repetition (400 to 600 times) is required for the human brain to master a new sound. This degree of repetition is necessary for the formation of an auditory template of each new sound. Once each new sound is mastered, it is reinforced each time you hear it in a patient.
By using this learning principle from psychoacoustic research, Heart Songs produces a significant improvement in cardiac auscultation in a relatively short time. Two controlled trials1,2 have shown that proficiency in cardiac auscultation routinely exceeds 80% using this approach.
1. Barrett MJ, Lacey CS, Sekara AE, Linden EA, Gracely EJ. Mastering cardiac murmurs: the power of repetition. Chest 2004;126:470-5.
2. Barrett MJ, Kuzma MA, Seto TC, et al. The power of repetition in mastering cardiac auscultation. Amer J Med 2006;119:73-5.