Elaine Chew
Operations Researcher • Pianist
Professor of Engineering | King’s College London ( Department of Engineering | School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences )
Founder, Director | Music Theranostics Laboratory
Music science : Music information research, computational music structure analysis, performance science, music perception and cognition, music representation
Mathematical science : Data science, visualisation, sonification, mathematical modelling, optimisation, probability & statistics, signal processing
Cardiovascular science : Neurocardiology, autonomic response, time/frequency domain signal analysis, ECG sonification
Recent
Music to Make the Heart Sing (left), Slice of MIT, 23 Jan 2025
BBC One Morning Live : Music Heart Health with Ben Gernon (below), 8 Apr 2025
ARTE : The Future of Music directed by Anna Neuhaus, 2 May 2025
Seeing music’s effect on the heart. EHJ, 2024, 45(41): 4359–4363
Putting (One’s) Heart Into Music. EHJ, 2021, 42(28): 2721–2724
How music can literally heal the heart. Scientific American (Op), 18 Sep 2021
Ensemble musicians’ heartbeats, Front Psych 2025 (Soliński et al.)
Music based GCNN diagnosis of hypertension, Comp Card 2025 (Pal et al.)
High BP inhibits cardiovascular responsiveness to music, Sci Rep 2025 (Pope et al.)
Music Engineering + Cardiovascular Science
1. Falling Walls Breakthrough of the Year 2023 (Art & Science) : Breaking the Wall to Musical Medicine
2. Heart Rhythm Congress 2021 (Lifelong Learning): Music – An underutilised tool in neuro-cardiology? (co-presenting with Pier Lambiase)
3. MES2024 Closing Concert : Elez / Boulaine (with Gérard Assayag, somax2) semi-improvisation with real-time heartfm visuals of performer heartbeats, breathing, and heart rate variability (software engineer: Charles Picasso)
4. ARTE documentary : The Future of Music directed by Anna Neuhaus, 2 May 2025 (video available for 3 months)
Computational Modelling
1. ARTE.TV : 42, la réponse à presque tout (the answer to almost everything) : Entendons-nous tous pareil ? (Do we all hear the same ?)
2. Le Monde and Reportage CNRS: Le Piano Virtuose: A short film about ERC COSMOS (English version)(with IRCAM COSMOS team)
3. Papers we love: Decoding the sensuality in music: How maths helps us understand why music moves people
4. Los Angeles Philharmonic Inside the Music: real-time tonal analysis & visualisation of 18th variation in Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini on musa_rt (software engineer: Alex François)
Heartbeat Music
1. Arrhythmia Suite : abnormal heart rhythms to music by EC (2017–2021)
2. Little Etudes for Piano based on aberrations of cardiac electrophysiology (music by EC, descriptions by PDL)
3. Stolen Rhythms on the CosmoNote citizen science platform for interactive viewing, hearing, annotating of music and linked biosignals (cosmonote software engineer: Lawrence Fyfe)
4. Mouse #1730 at 6 months and 30 months : heartbeat music by Chew, Tagirova, Maltsev, Lakatta (2023)
Contemporary Piano : Acoustic
1. Pierre Boulez : Fragment d’une ébauche (1987) (EC, recorded 2021 at IRCAM, 3 versions : #1 structured, #2 artificial fast, #3 natural fast)
2. Ivan Tcherepnin: Fêtes – Variations on Happy Birthday (1975) (UK première by EC, recorded live 2023 at Barts900)
3. Peter Child : Prologue – Doubles III – Epilogue (1998–1999) mostly bi-tonal pieces based on songs from my childhood
4. Chen Yi: Ba Ban (1999) (Boston première by EC, recorded live 2000 at Jordan Hall)
Contemporary Piano : Experimental
1. Camine Emanuele Cella : Expectations per pianoforte (2011) (UK première by EC, recorded live 2016 at Schott Music Shop)
2. Oded Ben Tal : Sonata (Scarlatti, Schubert, Scriabin) for Andrew McPherson’s Magnetic Resonator Piano & live electronics (World première by EC, 2016 at Schott Music Shop)