Elaine Chew is Professor of Engineering at King’s College London jointly appointed between the Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences’ Department of Engineering and the Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine’s School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences: Research Departments of Cardiovascular Imaging and Biomedical Computing. At King’s, she is founder and director of the Music Theranostics Laboratory at where she leads research on digital music therapeutics and precision diagnostics with focus on cardiovascular disease.
An operations researcher and pianist by training, Elaine is a leading authority in music representation, music information research (MIR), and music perception and cognition, and an established performer. A pioneering researcher in MIR, she is forging new paths at the intersection of music and cardiovascular science. Her research focuses on the mathematical and computational modelling of musical structures in music, with application to music-heart-brain interaction, and in electrocardiographic traces for computational arrhythmia research.
She is Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant COSMOS (Computational Shaping and Modeling of Musical Structures) and Proof of Concept HEART.FM (Maximizing the Therapeutic Potential of Music through Tailored Therapy with Physiological Feedback in Cardiovascular Disease), using data/citizen science techniques to decipher the functions and mechanisms of music expressivity and deploying them for autonomic modulation.
Her work has been recognised by the US Presidential Early Career Award in Science & Engineering (PECASE, 2004 received in 2005), the highest honour the US government bestows upon outstanding scientists and engineers awarded at the White House, and the National Science Foundation Faculty Early CAREER Development Award (2004). The NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) nominated Elaine for the PECASE, “For being an engineer and professional musician whose research involves creating computer assisted methods for making music by both experienced and inexperienced musicians alike. Her computational models of music perception and cognition allow expressive decisions in music by even novice performers that are usually accessible only to musicians after years of practice.” Subsequently, she was awarded the Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellowship at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2007-2008) and the Falling Walls Breakthrough of the Year Award (Art & Science, 2023). Elaine is an alum (Fellow) of the (US) National Academy of Science’s Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposia (German-American) and of the (US) National Academy of Engineering’s Frontiers of Engineering Symposia (Japan-American, US) for outstanding young scientists/engineers.
Her research has been supported by the ERC, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and the National Research Foundation (NSF). Past projects include the Expression Synthesis Project (shaping performance through driving), Distributed Immersive Performance (musical duets with network latency). The ongoing MuSA.RT (real-time tonal analysis and visualisation on the spiral array) was part of a Radcliffe research cluster with Alexandre François, Analytical Listening through Interactive Visualisation; and, the arrhythmia music was part of a Radcliffe summer fellowship.
A transdisciplinary scholar, Elaine’s outputs span STEMM and arts/humanities traditions. She is centre of one of 9 publication clusters having ≥5 women in the international Music Information Retrieval community (ISMIR 2016 infometric study), is author of a Springer monograph on Mathematical and Computational Modeling of Tonality (2014), and has recorded music on Albany (Doubles) and Neuma (Child’s Play) Records. She is a member of the distinguished Editorial Advisory Board of the Computer Music Journal, and founding member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Mathematics and Music, and ACM Computers in Entertainment. She has served on the visiting committee of MIT’s Music and Theatre Arts Section (2004-2012) and the external review committee of Georgia Tech’s School of Music (2017); and, she is adjudicator for the 2017 Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, and the 2017 Falling Walls Lab and the 2024 Breakthrough of the Year at the Falling Walls Science Summit in Berlin.
Elaine has been interviewed in documentaries The Future of Music (ARTE), The Man Who Saved Geometry (TVO), and Bridging Urban America, for which she also recorded soundtracks. She has been interviewed on Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Inside the Music, ARTE.TV’s 42, BBC Radio 3 and BBC World Service, and podcasts of Ada Lovelace Day and Barbican’s Science on Screen. Her research has been featured on Der Spiegel, Zeit Online, Smithsonian Magazine, Philadelphia Inquirer, Wired Blog, MIT Technology Review, The Telegraph, etc. She is a frequent invited keynote/plenary speaker, and often integrates interactive scientific visualisations and lab-grown compositions in her live demonstrations and concert-conversations.
Elaine received PhD and SM degrees in Operations Research at MIT, a BAS in Mathematical & Computational Sciences (honours) and Music (distinction) at Stanford, and FTCL and LTCL diplomas in Piano Performance from Trinity College, London. Her MIT doctoral thesis on mathematical modeling of tonality supervised by Jeanne Bamberger and Georgia Perakis, is widely regarded as one of the most successful models of tonal perception. Her SM in operations research at MIT, supervised by Dimitri Bertsimas, employed Feynman Diagrams and approximate dynamic programming in multi-period portfolio optimisation in the nascent years of computational finance. Her honours thesis at Stanford tested an early interior point algorithm proposed by John von Neumann and was supervised by George B Dantzig, the father of linear programming.
Prior to joining King’s, she was a senior CNRS researcher in the Sciences et Technologies de la Musique et du Sons (STMS) Laboratoire at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique / Musique (IRCAM) (Paris: 2019-2022), Professor of Digital Media at the QMUL Centre for Digital Music (London: 2011-2019) where she founded the Music, Performance and Expressivity (MuPaE) Lab, Assistant then tenured Associate Professor at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA: 2001-2011) where she held the inaugural Viterbi Early Career Chair, founded the Music Computation and Cognition (MuCoaCo) Lab, and served as Research Area Director in Human Performance Engineering in the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC), and NSF Engineering Research Center. She was also Visiting Professor at King’s Engineering (London: 2020-2022), Harvard SEAS & Music (Cambridge, MA: 2008-2009) and Lehigh IMSE (Bethlehem, PA: 2000-2001).
