Elaine Chew is an operations researcher and pianist focused on the study of musical structures as they apply to musical performance, composition and cognition,[3] the analysis of electrocardiographic traces of arrhythmia,[4][5] and digital therapeutics.[1][6] She is currently Professor of Engineering at King's College London, where she is jointly appointed in the Department of Engineering (Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences) and the Department of Cardiovascular Imaging in the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences (Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine).[7]
Biography
Born in Buffalo, New York, Chew grew up in Singapore, returning to the US after high school for further studies.[8] She received a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences in Mathematical and Computational Sciences with honours and Music with distinction from Stanford University. Her PhD thesis in the Operations Research Center at MIT was focused on the mathematics of tonality.[9] Chew holds diplomas in piano performance from Trinity College, London.[10]
Career and research
Chew has designed a theory of tonality called the spiral array model.[11][12] This is a mathematical model using spirals to describe how humans perceive pitches, chords and keys in mainstream Western music. Chew wrote Mathematical and Computational Modeling of Tonality, a book about her work on mathematical and computational techniques for automated analysis and visualisation of tonal structures, in 2014.[13]
As a concert pianist, Chew plays for audiences while communicating her research, often by showing mathematical visualisations alongside the performances.[18][19][20]
Awards and honours
European Research Council funding for the project COSMOS: Computational Shaping and Modeling of Musical Structures (2018)[21]
^Chew, Elaine (2002). "The Spiral Array: An Algorithm for Determining Key Boundaries". In Anagnostopoulou, Christina; Ferrand, Miguel; Smaill, Alan (eds.). Music and Artificial Intelligence. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 2445. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. pp. 18–31. doi:10.1007/3-540-45722-4_4. ISBN9783540457220. S2CID17574236.
Harrison, Peter M.C. (2017). "Mathemusical Conversations: Mathematics and Computation in Music Performance and Composition". Empirical Musicology Review. Lecture Notes Series, Institute for Mathematical Sciences, National University of Singapore. 32 (1). doi:10.1142/10046. ISBN9789813140097.