Chew

Elaine Chew (Pianist and Operations Researcher; Professor of Digital Media, QML School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science; Director of Music Initiatives / Music Performance and Expression Lead, QML Centre for Digital Music)

Elaine Chew is a Professor of Digital Media at Queen Mary University of London, where she leads the research theme on Music Performance and Expression in the Centre for Digital Music. Previously, she was a faculty member at the University of Southern California, where she founded and directed research at the Music Computation and Cognition Laboratory, first as an Assistant Professor, then a tenured Associate Professor. She was recipient of the United States (US) National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award and a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering. In 2007-2008, she was the Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies; the following year, she was visiting scholar in computer science and music at Harvard University.

Chew received PhD and SM degrees in Operations Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a BAS in Mathematical and Computational Sciences (honors) and in Music (distinction) at Stanford University, and FTCL and LTCL diplomas in Piano Performance from Trinity College, London. Her research aims to explain the thinking and work behind expressive performance—what musicians do, how they do it, and why. Her primary research directions include making concrete the conceptualized structures and expressive decisions that shape a musical communication using mathematical models, computational methods, and scientific visualisations. Chew's publications appear in computing, engineering, and music research journals and conferences, and most recently in a monograph "Mathematical and Computational Modeling of Tonality: Theory and Application", the first music theory publication in the Springer Series on Operations Research and Management Science.

Chew also disseminates her work through boundary-crossing lecture-recitals designed to help audiences think more deeply about the music and performances that they hear. Following a performance at the International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, "Gottfried Leibniz once said: "Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic." That quotation was projected onto a screen before another musical performance at the conference last week ... But here's betting that Einstein and Leibniz never imagined anything like the [MuSA.RT] software that accompanied Chew on her Yamaha grand piano." During her term as Affiliated Artist of Music and Theatre Arts at MIT, she founded and directed performances by the Aurelius Ensemble. Recent musical adventures include performances on McPherson's magnetic resonator piano and Practicing Haydn, a collaboration with conceptual artist Lina Viste Grønli and composer Peter Child.

A frequent invited speaker, Chew has given keynote and plenary lectures at the National Academy of Engineering US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, London Hopper Colloquium, Society for Music Perception and Cognition Conference, Association for Technology in Music Instruction Conference, UCLA Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, and the Digital Music Research Network Workshop. She has served as organizer of a number of scientific meetings such as the German-American Frontiers of Science Symposium of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and US National Academy of Sciences, International Conference of the Society of Music Information Retrieval, and International Conference on Mathematics and Music. She has also served on the steering committee of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, and on the MIT Music and Theater Arts Visiting Committee.

Webpage - www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~eniale