Photo by Bob Calverley
Elaine Chew, a concert pianist, is also an assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering in the USC School of Engineering.

Issue Date: 1/21/2002

Concert Pianist Probes the Structure of Music With Engineering and Mathematics Tools

by Bob Calverley

As her fingers danced over the keys of the Steinway grand piano at a December concert, Elaine Chew was applying an analytical approach gleaned from her day job: assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering at the USC School of Engineering.

"My technical training is in operations research, the science of decision-making," she explained. "A performance is the result of a series of decisions, either conscious or unconscious. A musician plots a course through a complex network of choices using his or her experience, analysis and instinct."

Chew is a senior investigator at the Integrated Media Systems Center, engineering teacher, accomplished concert pianist and avid proponent of new music.

Born in Buffalo, N.Y., she spent most of her childhood in Singapore before returning to America to study music, mathematics and engineering. She majored in music and computational mathematics as an undergraduate at Stanford and earned her master’s and Ph.D. in operations research from MIT. In her Ph.D. dissertation, she proposed a representation for tonality. She used this representation to create computer models that can mimic human capabilities in finding keys and determining modulations in Western tonal music.

Chew believes that music is the ideal domain in which to study communication, creativity, human perception and cognition. By building computer models that can probe more deeply into the structure of music and by relating this structure to performance decisions, she hopes to gain a deeper understanding of human creativity and communication. She also says that such insights will become applicable to other fields of study.

"Music, mathematics and engineering are all human attempts to describe and understand the logic and patterns in the world in which we live. Using the language of one to describe the other and understanding the commonalities among the seemingly disparate fields reveals as much about ourselves as they do the world around us," she said.

In addition to music, her research has focused on computational finance, computational biology and mathematical programming. All the while, she has balanced her science and engineering career with an active piano performance schedule that has taken her around the world.

At the Dec. 3 performance at the Herbert Zipper Concert Hall, Chew played selections from "Doubles," a bi-tonal composition that Peter Child, professor of music at MIT, wrote expressly for her. Chew had notated and faxed Child the melodies from several Chinese and Malay folk songs that she knew from childhood. The MIT professor reworked the melodies into a series of complex pieces.

"I am not a composer," she said, "but I do like to work closely with composers on their creations."

As a child, Chew and her siblings competed to see who could sing the folk song "Spring Song" the fastest; Child presents that melody in a rush of fleeting notes. The "Cockatoo" is characterized by a series of playful and staccato notes that sound like a bird hopping. Two other Malay melody-based pieces, "Riversong" and "Sampan Variations," melt into a burst of ragtime.

Maybe it was the Steinway grand, which Chew described as "like smooth, velvety chocolate," but her smile was electric as she played "Doubles."

"I was thinking of the words that I sang with my brother and sister. It makes me happy," she said. "I’m not surprised that a New England composer can evoke the same emotions from audiences that I felt as a child in Singapore, because music transcends cultures."

Some artists maintain that it is not possible to explain a concept such as melody. Chew clearly disagrees, using modern engineering tools in her work to investigate music.

"Understand music, and you begin to understand how the human mind works," she said.