TITLE: Music and Operations Research
SPEAKER: Elaine Chew, Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering
and of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California Viterbi
School of
Engineering
DATE / TIME: Friday, September 19, 2008 / 2:30 - 3:30 p.m.
LOCATION: Zoellner Arts Center, Room 345, 420 East Packer Avenue #49
ABSTRACT: The widespread access to digitally encoded music, from desktop browsers to
handheld devices, has given rise to the need for mathematical and computational
techniques for generating, manipulating, processing, storing and retrieving digital
music. Operations research (OR) is a field that prides itself in its versatility in the
mathematical modeling of complex problems to find optimal or feasible solutions. It
should come as no surprise that OR has much to offer in terms of solving problems in
music composition, analysis, and performance. Operations researchers have tackled
problems in areas ranging from airline yield management and computational finance, to
computational biology and radiation oncology, to computational linguistics, and in
eclectic applications such as diet formulation, sports strategies and chicken dominance
behavior, so why not music?
The mathematical nature of music makes it particularly amenable to efficient and
effective representation in numerical (digital) form, and to computational modeling to
assist in its composing, expressive rendering, and analysis. I shall give examples of how
musical problems can be framed and solved mathematically and computationally, using
techniques familiar to the OR community. Mathematics provides a means to represent and
relate music structures one to another, and computational techniques allow us to
automatically determine and analyze these structures. Performance can be viewed as a set
of expressive strategy decisions constrained by the structure of the notes in the score.
Music composition and improvisation can often be thought of as the exploration of a
solution space bounded by constraints imposed by the composer or improviser. Specific
examples will include ESP, the expression synthesis project, MIMI, a multimodal musical
improvisation interface, and a live demonstration of MuSA.RT, an interactive music
analysis and visualization system. ESP is joint work with Jie Liu and Alexandre François,
MIMI and MuSA.RT are joint work with Alexandre François.
BIOGRAPHY: Elaine Chew is Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering
and of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of
Engineering, where she founded and heads the Music Computation and Cognition Lab. She is
currently a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. In 2007-2008, Prof. Chew was the
Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced
Study, where she and Alexandre Francois formed a cluster on Analytical Listening through
Interactive Visualization. She is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER
award and the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering in 2004 and
2005, respectively, for her research and education initiatives at the intersection of
music and engineering.
She received her PhD and SM in Operations Research from MIT, BAS in Mathematical and
Computational Sciences (honors) and in Music (distinction) from Stanford, and diplomas
(Fellowship and Licentiate) in piano performance from Trinity College, London. Prof.
Chew has performed widely as soloist and chamber musician, and commissioned, premiered,
and recorded compositions by contemporary composers. She founded and directed the
Aurelius Ensemble, and served as Affiliated Artist of MIT's Music and Theater Arts
Section 1998-2000. Prof. Chew has showcased MuSA.RT in concert-conversations, titled The
Mathematics in Music, at venues in North America and Asia. One such concert-conversation
at MIT is featured in the September 2008 issue of Technology Review.
