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 where she leads research on music-based digital therapeutics and precision diagnostics for cardiovascular disease.
An operations researcher and pianist by training, Elaine has been a pioneering researcher in music information research (MIR) for over 25 years; since 2016, she has been forcing new paths at the intersection of MIR and cardiovascular science. A leading authority in music representation and computational cognition, she is known for inventing the spiral array, one of the most successful mathematical models for tonal perception. She is centre of one of 9 publication clusters having ≥5 women in the international MIR community (ISMIR 2016 infometric study). Her research focuses on the mathematical and computational modelling of musical structures in music and linked cardiovascular signals, with application to music-heart-brain interaction and computational arrhythmia research. Her team’s music-based computational cardiology research regularly breaks new ground at the leading cardiology congresses.
Her work has been recognised by 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). She is recipient of the US Presidential Early Career Award in Science & Engineering (PECASE) (2004 in 2005)—”For being an engineer and professional musician whose research involves creating computer assisted methods for making music by both experienced and inexperienced musicians alike”—the National Science Foundation Faculty Early CAREER Development Award (2004), 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/Engineering’s Kavli Frontiers of Science/Engineering Symposia. Her research has been supported by the ERC, EPSRC, AHRC, and NSF.
Elaine is a frequent keynote speaker at international conferences and eminent science festivals. An established performer, she regularly integrates live scientific visualisations of music structures (musa_rt : music on the spiral array . real-time) and cardiovascular reactions (heartfm : heart breath visuals) and lab-grown compositions (arrhythmia music) in her presentations. She has been interviewed and her work featured in documentaries The Future of Music (ARTE), The Man Who Saved Geometry (TVO), and Bridging Urban America, 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 Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Zeit Online, Smithsonian Magazine, Philadelphia Inquirer, Wired Blog, MIT Technology Review, NPR, ClassicFM, Frankfurter Allegemeine, The Telegraph, etc. Her arrhythmia music has won an Unexpected Oscar for Best Original Music on BBC World Service.
Prior to joining King’s, she was a senior CNRS researcher in the STMS Lab at 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 and founded the Music Computation and Cognition (MuCoaCo) Lab. 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).
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 was supervised by Jeanne Bamberger and Georgia Perakis; her honours thesis at Stanford tested an early interior point algorithm proposed by John von Neumann and was supervised by George B Dantzig.
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