CLEVELAND — Slash is among the performers scheduled to play at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s tribute concert for his guitar hero Les Paul.

The former Guns N’ Roses guitarist says he’s committed to doing anything he can for the 93-year-old Paul, known as the “Father of the Electric Guitar.”

Paul’s many contributions to music include building the first solid-body electric guitar in 1941.

Slash says he has played with Paul — and couldn’t keep up with him.

Paul, a resident of Mahwah, is expected to attend the American Music Masters series event.

The lineup of guitar virtuosos for the Nov. 15 concert includes Paul’s fellow New Jersey-based guitarists, Richie Sambora of Bon Jovi and Lenny Kaye. Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top and The Ventures also are scheduled to perform.

People with pacemakers could be at risk listening to music with headphones. If the headphones for music players are placed within an inch of pacemakers and implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICD), they may interfere with the medical devices, according to researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Medical Device Safety Institute.

“For patients with pacemakers, exposure to the headphones can force the device to deliver signals to the heart, causing it to beat without regard to the patients’ underlying heart rhythm,” said Dr. William Maisel, senior author of the study and director of the Medical Device Safety Institute. “Exposure of a defibrillator to the headphones can temporarily deactivate the defibrillator.”

Millions of people with abnormal heart rhythms have pacemakers and implantable cardioverter defibrillators. A pacemaker produces electrical impulses that start a heartbeat, according to the American Heart Association. The impulses then flow through tiny wires to a person’s heart and are timed to flow at regular intervals.

An ICD is a device that has wires implanted into the heart tissue and can deliver electrical shocks, detect the rhythm of the heart, and pace the heart’s rhythms as needed.

Researchers at Beth Israel tested eight different MP3 player headphone models, including clip-on and ear buds, on 60 patients with defibrillators or pacemakers.

Doctors placed the headphones on the patients’ chests and monitored them. What they found was that the magnet in the headphones interfered in 15 percent of patients with pacemakers and 30 percent of those with defibrillators.

Magnetic strengths were also tested by the researchers, using a gauss meter to measure the charges. A magnetic strength of 10 gauss at the site of a pacemaker or defibrillator can interact with the device; researchers found some of the headphones had field strengths of 200 gauss or more.

“Even at those high levels, we did not observe any interactions when the headphones were at least three centimeters, or about 1.2 inches, from the skin’s surface,” Maisel said.

Maisel and his research colleagues, who have been testing the reliability of these devices for several years, shared their findings at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2008.

In another report presented at the conference, a team from Southampton University Hospital in Britain said that in the future, the heart itself could be used to generate some of the power needed to run pacemakers and defibrillators. Their proof-of-concept study could allow the next generation of medical devices to last longer with more functions without increasing their size, as would be necessary if larger batteries were used.