Elaine Chew is an operations researcher and pianist focused on the study of musical structures as they apply to musical performance, composition and cognition, the analysis of electrocardiographic traces of

arrhythmia Arrhythmias, also known as cardiac arrhythmias, heart arrhythmias, or dysrhythmias, are irregularities in the heartbeat, including when it is too fast or too slow. A resting heart rate that is too fast – above 100 beats per minute in adults ...

, and

digital therapeutics Digital therapeutics, a subset of digital health, are evidence-based therapeutic interventions driven by high quality software programs to prevent, manage, or treat a medical disorder or disease. Digital therapeutic companies should publish trial re ...

. She is currently Professor of Engineering at

King's College London King's College London (informally King's or KCL) is a public research university located in London, England. King's was established by royal charter in 1829 under the patronage of King George IV and the Duke of Wellington. In 1836, King's ...

, where she is jointly appointed in the Department of Engineering (Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences) and the Department of Cardiovascular Imaging in the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences (Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine).

Biography

Born in Buffalo, New York, Chew grew up in Singapore, returning to the US after high school for further studies. She received a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences in Mathematical and Computational Sciences with honours and Music with distinction from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

. Her PhD thesis in the Operations Research Center at MIT was focused on the mathematics of tonality. Chew holds diplomas in piano performance from

Trinity College, London Trinity College London (TCL) is an examination board based in London, United Kingdom, which offers graded and diploma qualifications (up to postgraduate level) across a range of disciplines in the performing arts and English language learning and ...

Career and research

Chew has designed a theory of tonality called the spiral array model. This is a mathematical model using spirals to describe how humans perceive pitches, chords and keys in mainstream Western music. Chew wrote ''Mathematical and Computational Modeling of Tonality,'' a book about her work on mathematical and computational techniques for automated analysis and visualisation of tonal structures, in 2014. Chew was an assistant professor at the University of Southern California (USC) from 2001 to 2011, where she was the inaugural honouree of the Viterbi Early Career Chair and founded the Music Computation and Cognition Laboratory. At USC, Chew encouraged her students to use technology to explore expressivity in music. Chew was Professor of Digital Media in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London from 2011 to 2019, where she founded the Music, Performance, and Expressivity Laboratory at the Centre for Digital Music. From 2019 to 2022, Chew was a senior Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) researcher at the Science et Technologies de la Musique et du Son (STMS) Laboratory and also affiliated with the

Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique An institute is an organisational body created for a certain purpose. They are often research organisations ( research institutes) created to do research on specific topics, or can also be a professional body. In some countries, institutes ca ...

(IRCAM), Sorbonne University, and the French Ministry of Culture. As a concert pianist, Chew plays for audiences while communicating her research, often by showing mathematical visualisations alongside the performances.

Awards and honours

European Research Council The European Research Council (ERC) is a public body for funding of scientific and technological research conducted within the European Union (EU). Established by the European Commission in 2007, the ERC is composed of an independent Scientific ...

funding for the project COSMOS: Computational Shaping and Modeling of Musical Structures (2018) * Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (2005) * Fellowships at Harvard's

Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University—also known as the Harvard Radcliffe Institute—is a part of Harvard University that fosters interdisciplinary research across the humanities, sciences, social sciences, arts, a ...

(2007 and 2017) * Fellow of the (US) National Academy of Science's Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposia and of the (US) National Academy of Engineering's Frontiers of Engineering Symposia for outstanding young scientists and engineers

References

Sources

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Chew, Elaine Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Women musicologists 21st-century women mathematicians Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Stanford University alumni Academics of Queen Mary University of London University of Southern California faculty Women pianists Recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers