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 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.
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.
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, 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 regarded as one of the most successful models of tonal perception. Her honours thesis at Stanford tested an early interior point algorithm proposed by John von Neumann and was supervised by George B Dantzig.
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).
