Born in Buffalo, NY, and raised in Singapore, artist-scientist Elaine Chew is based in London, UK, having lived many years in the US and some years in France. A virtuoso pianist and researcher of music-heart interactions, Elaine is a frequent invited keynote speaker. She regularly integrates lab-grown compositions and real-time scientific visualisations of music structures and performer-listener physiology in her presentations/performances.
Elaine studied piano with Ong Lip-Tat—with whom she completed her LTCL and FTCL piano diplomas—Goh Lee-Choo, and Martina Maixnerova in Singapore. In the US, she studied piano with James Goldsworthy and George Barth at Stanford, and David Deveau at MIT, where she completed a doctoral dissertation on mathematical modelling of tonality with Schnabel student Jeanne Bamberger. She studied chamber music with Philip Levy at Stanford, with Marcus Thompson, John Harbison, Lynn Chang, and Jean Rife at MIT, and with Peter Marsh at USC. An exceptional sightreader, Elaine has been accompanist for Judith Bettina’s Stanford and John Oliver’s MIT vocal repertoire classes. She has performed in masterclasses for Menahem Pressler, György Sándor, and Ruth Slenczynska, and collaborated with musicians/veterans of the LA Philharmonic, Ensemble Modern, BBC Orchestra, London Chamber Orchestra, and Utah Symphony.
Elaine made her concerto debut with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra at the age of sixteen as the youngest finalist in the Diner’s Club Pianist of the Year Competition, for which she was commended for her “sustained virtuosity” (Straits Times). She would later be invited to return to perform with the SSO at the President’s Charity Concert during her studies at MIT. While still in high school, Elaine agreed to take on a last-minute request to accompany two internationally renowned Canadian opera singers at a televised New Year’s Eve variety show at Kallang Theatre and their recital of French music at Le Meridien Singapour, sparking a new concert series “Young Musicians on Sunday”.
At MIT, Elaine was one of three students selected by Pulitzer Prize winning composer John Harbison to accompany Yo-Yo Ma in an open rehearsal of his Cello Concerto. Collaborations with composer Peter Child resulted in pieces written for her—Doubles III (1998-1999) and Three Movements for Piano (2011)—and CD recordings of Child’s Trio (Neuma) and Doubles (Albany: TROY1114). Doubles was praised for its “speed and dexterity” and “jeweled precision of touch” (Fanfare Magazine). Following a MISTI-funded Beijing field study and recital and photo exhibition in the Embassy Series in Washington, D.C., Elaine was awarded the Laya and Jerome B. Wiesner Award (1998) for outstanding achievement and contribution to the arts.
Appointed Affiliated artist of MIT’s Music and Theater Arts Section, she founded the Aurelius Ensemble and led its standing room only eclectic post-tonal music concerts (1998-2000). A collaboration amongst Chew, Child, and conceptual artist Lina Viste Grønli resulted in Practicing Haydn (2013), a transcription of Chew’s sight reading of a Haydn Sonata movement into a performable piece, which premiered at the grand opening of the Kunsthall Stavanger. Elaine has also premièred compositions by, and worked with, composers Chen Yi, Tamar Diesendruck, Jose Elizondo, John Harbison, Chee Kong Ho, Cecilia Heejeong Kim, Alba Potes, Eric Sawyer, Paul Schoenfield, Ivan Tcherepnin, and Rodney Waschka II. Her live performance of Poulenc’s Sextuor with Lehigh University’s East Winds Quintet and Ivan Tcherepnin’s Fêtes–Variations on Happy Birthday has been broadcast on WDIY and WGBH’s Art of the States.
Elaine frequently showcases technological innovations from her research in her performances, including MuSA_RT (real-time analysis and visualisation of tonal structures on the spiral array) and HeartFM (real-time visualisation of music and performer heartbeats, breathing, and heart rate variability). Her work at the intersection of music science and cardiovascular science was recognised as the Falling Walls Breakthrough of the Year (Art & Science, 2023). Other forays into technology include co-creating improvisations with somax2 guided by Gérard Assayag, co-designing the MorpheuS music generation system with Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoc Dorien Herremans and premièring its compositions, and performing on Andrew McPherson’s magnetic resonator piano selections from Secrets of Antikythera by McPherson and the world première of Oded Ben-Tal’s Sonata for MRP and live electronics.
Encounters with cardiac arrhythmia prompted Elaine to create a series of Arrhythmia Music pieces, exact mappings of electrocardiograms of abnormal heartbeats to artistically sound music compositions. These include Stolen Rhythms (2017, 2022), Little Etudes (2020) and the Arrhythmia Suite (2017-2021). The arrhythmia music won an Unexpected Oscar for Best Original Music in BBC World Service’s Unexpected Elements, and has been performed by internationally acclaimed pianist Dora Deliyska at the inaugural meeting of the European Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Patient Foundation in Vienna.
Elaine has been interviewed on ARTE’s 42, Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Inside the Music, BBC One Morning Live, BBC Radio 3 and BBC World Service, podcasts of Ada Lovelace Day and the Barbican, and in documentaries, The Future of Music (ARTE), The Man Who Saved Geometry (TVO), and Bridging Urban America, for which she also recorded soundtracks. Her work has been featured on Der Spiegel, Le Monde, Zeit Online, Smithsonian Magazine, Philadelphia Inquirer, Wired Blog, MIT Technology Review, The Telegraph, etc.
Elaine is also an award-winning computational scientist, specialising in the design of algorithms to decode and analyse musical structures and their effects on human physiology. She is on the distinguished Editorial Advisory Board of the Computer Music Journal (since 2016) and served on the Scientific Council of Ircam (2019), Visiting / External Review Committees of MIT Music and Theater Arts (2004-2012) and the Georgia Tech School of Music (2017), and as adjudicator for the 2017 Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, 2022 AI Song Contest, 2025 Burroughs Wellcome Art-Science NEXUS, and 2024/2025 Falling Walls Breakthrough of the Year (Art & Science).
Bio Music (short) (≤100, ≤150 words)
“Whether dispatching chordal thunder, sprinting through scintillating virtuoso runs with sparkling fingerwork, or whispering tender poetry, she embraced all with panache, entertaining aplomb and an acute sense of wit, revealing herself as a real minx, coy but full of flair” (Straits Times)
“the VCH piano…sounds so light, even `French’. Obviously, the piano is responsive in her hands, those of an intelligent soloist at work, … She plays with a spontaneous quality, a kind of knowing nonchalance which fits so well into the teasing nature of this music. I thought this made the performance decidedly… sexy” (Flying Inkpot).
