biography
Elaine Chew, Associate Professor at the University of Southern California, is Founder and Director of the Music Computation and Cognition Lab (MuCoaCo) at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, where she conducts and directs research on music and computing. An operations researcher and pianist by training, her goal is to explain and de-mystify the phenomenon of music and its performance through the use of formal scientific methods. Her research centers on the mathematical and computational modeling of music; as a performer, she collaborates with composers to present eclectic post-tonal music. Elaine Chew earned a Ph.D. and S.M. degrees in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with an interdisciplinary dissertation on mathematical modeling of tonality, and a B.A.S. in Mathematical and Computational Sciences (honors) and in Music Performance (distinction) from Stanford University. Her graduate studies were supported by an Office of Naval Research and the Josephine de Kármán Dissertation fellowships. Her subsequent work has been suported by the National Science Foundation, most notably an NSF Early Career Award and Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE), an NSF Information Technology Research (ITR) grant, and NSF Engineering Research Center Collaborative Agreement grant through the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. She received the NSF Career/PECASE Awards for her research and education activities at the intersection of music and engineering. She was the first honoree of the Viterbi Early Career Chair (2005-2007), and served as Research Area Director of IMSC. In 2007-2008, Chew was the Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow at the Radclife Institute for Advanced Study, where she and Alexandre François formed a cluster on Analytical Listening through Interactive Visualization. She was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Scool of Applied and Engineering Sciences and Music Department the following year. Chew is on the founding editorial boards of the Journal of Mathematics and Music, Journal of Music and Meaning, and ACM Computers in Entertainment. She has organized special issues and workshops on music and computing, and frequently serves on program and technical committees of music and computing conferences. She was program co-chair of the 2008 International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR2008), and of the 2009 International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music (MCM 2009). Chew serves as a member of the Visiting Committee for Music and Theater Arts at MIT, and of the Advisory Committee of the Center for Digital Music at Queen Mary University, London (QMUL), and as member of the Steering Committees for the International Conference on Music Information Retrieval and for the Online Music Recognition and Searching 2 Project at QMUL. She has given numerous invited lectures on mathematics/computation and music, including as keynote speaker at the Society for Music Perception and Cognition meeting, the West Coast Conference of Music Theory and Analysis, and the Suncoast Music Education Research Symposium. Chew also holds diplomas and degrees in piano performance from Trinity College, London (FTCL & LTCL), and Stanford University; in 1998, she received MIT's prestigious Laya and Jerome Wiesner Award for her contribution to the arts. She was an Affiliated Artist of MIT's Music and Theatre Arts from 1998-2000, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Lehigh University before joining USC in 2001. Her artistic endeavors include the founding of the MIT-based Aurelius Ensemble (1998-2000) and field research on contemporary Chinese piano music in China funded by a MISTI grant. A proponent of contemporary and eclectic repertoire, she has collaborated with composers such as Chen Yi, Peter Child, Tamar Diesendruck, Jose Elizondo, John Harbison, Paul Schoenfield, and Ivan Tcherepnin to present and premiere their work. In 1994, she was one of three student pianists selected by John Harbison to accompany Yo-Yo Ma in an open rehearsal of his Cello Concerto. Her recordings of Peter Child's Trio (1996) and of the Prologue, Doubles III, and Epilogue from Doubles (1998-1999) have been released on Neuma and Albany Records, respectively. Doubles III was written for Chew and based on songs from her childhood. She continues to perform widely as chamber musician and soloist. Her performances of Poulenc's Sextuor with the East Winds Quintet and of Ivan Tcherepnin's Fêtes - Variations on Happy Birthday can be heard on WDIY and WGBH's Art of the States program, respectively. She speaks on mathematics and music in, and plays the soundtrack (piano compositions by a young Donald Coxeter) for, the TV Ontario documentary on the geometer's life, "The Man Who Saved Geometry." Chew has initiated and participated in the multimedia concerts The Mathematics in Music, Flying Sonics, and Dark Blue Sky Dream. The Mathematics in Music, created for Visions and Voices' first season, has appeared in venues across North America, including Cambridge, MA, Raleigh, NC, and Victoria, BC, and in Singapore, and received coverage in the LA Times and MIT's Technology Review. Please see the CV (pdf) and music bio (html) for further details.
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