GOLDSTEIN Gets Your Heart Beating This Valentine’s Day with Asda

Creative agency, VCCP, have created 'Send Your Heart', the Valentine's Day app created for supermarket giants, Asda. 

Music production company, GOLDSTEIN, who had previously worked with VCCP Creative Director, Andy Booth, on the award-winning trailer for The Voice, were delighted to jump on board this project and step into unchartered territories with their first ever app soundtrack.

Music is a central part of the app and this is driven by the hero heartbeat. The brief was to strike a fine balance between emotive and schmaltzy with a dreamy, cool ambient vibe reminiscent of the 'wall of vocals' style epitomised by the like of Godley and Creme and 10CC. We called upon the talents of co-writers Henry Bennett and David William Hearn to help realise the track.

The first challenge was choosing the right heartbeat. Heartbeats mainly contain low frequencies, and this is problematic for handheld devices that have very little low frequency response. GOLDSTEIN needed to find a heartbeat that would speak well across these devices (involving the surreal process of actually auditioning different heartbeats), and then perform some fairly brutal EQing until it was bullet-proof. 

As the phone measures your heartbeat, the app selects the appropriate track at the corresponding BPM from a huge collection of pre-programmed variations, ranging from 40 to 200 BPM. This meant that the track had to be tweaked at various stages so that it worked across the whole range, otherwise the slowest would have felt very slow, and the fastest, very fast indeed.

The process was quite unlike scoring a TV commercial. There was no film edit, no v/o and no storyboard, simply a concept with an emotion and a strict instruction to make it work across a range of tempos, on every laptop and handheld device known to man. What could have been simpler? 

It proved to be a wonderful and rare opportunity to dig into the soul of music, scoop it out, and tie it up with a ribbon. 

Download the app today from the iTunes Store here or for Androids click here.