ANNOUNCEMENTS > PRESS RELEASES

'The Mathematics in Music -- a Concert-Conversation with Elaine Chew'

Cambridge, MA... Pianist-engineer Elaine Chew will explore mathematical principles in music through the performance of contemporary pieces that employ rhythmic, melodic, and tonal combinations, permutations, and transformations. "The Mathematics in Music -- a concert-conversation with Elaine Chew" will take place at 4:30 p.m., on Monday, May 12, 2008, at MIT’s Killian Hall, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge. Reception at 4:00 p.m. outside Killian Hall. Admission is free.

"The Mathematics in Music" has been warmly received in Los Angeles, North Carolina, Vancouver, and Singapore. This presentation of the program in the Northeastern United States marks the ten-year anniversary of MIT Professor Peter Child’s Doubles III (1998) written for Chew, and will include the Boston premier of two new pieces: Sudoku Variations (2006) by Tamar Diesendruck, and A Simple Gift for Elaine (2008) by Rodney Waschka II, also composed for Chew, for this particular concert program. Ivan Tcherepnin's Fêtes – Variations on Happy Birthday (1975) rounds out the program.

Presentations on the mathematical techniques employed in each composition will precede its performance.

The event will feature a live demonstration of the MuSA.RT interactive tonal analysis and visualization system by Chew and Alexandre R. J. François. MuSA.RT explores the use of Chew's Spiral Array model, a mathematical (geometric) model for tonality, in real-time analysis and scientific visualization of tonal music. The system is implemented using François’ Software Architecture for Immersipresence. Scientific and video documentation of the system can be found at www-rcf.usc.edu/~mucoaco/MuSA.RT. Chew and François are 2007-2008 fellows at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where they form a research cluster on Analytical Listening through Interactive Visualization. Their cluster activities are detailed at www-rcf.usc.edu/~mucoaco/Radcliffe.

Chew is the 2007–08 Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering. At USC, she was the first holder of the Viterbi Early Career Chair, and founder of the Music Computation and Cognition Laboratory. Chew continues to perform widely as a soloist and chamber musician. She was honored in 2004/05 by the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Award and the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, respectively, for her efforts in integrating research and education at the intersection of music and engineering.

Chew earned her PhD and SM degrees in Operations Research from MIT, with an interdisciplinary PhD dissertation on mathematical modeling of tonality, supervised by Jeanne Bamberger and co-advised by Georgia Perakis, and an SM thesis supervised by Dimitris Bertsimas. She arrived at MIT with a BAS in Mathematical and Computational Sciences (honors) and in Music Performance (distinction) from Stanford. She also holds d iplomas and degrees in piano performance from Trinity College, London (FTCL & LTCL), and Stanford. Chew's main piano teachers include Ong Lip Tat and Goh Lee Choo in Singapore, James Goldsworthy and George Barth at Stanford, and David Deveau at MIT. She studied chamber music with Marcus Thompson, John Harbison, Lynn Chang, and Jean Rife at MIT, and with Phillip Levy at Stanford; and, vocal repertoire with John Oliver (MIT), and Judith Bettina (Stanford).

The event is organized jointly by MIT’s Music & Theater Arts Section and the Department of Mathematics, and is sponsored in part by the Council for the Arts at MIT.