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Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Northwestern CS+X Seminar


Delighted to be visiting Northwestern University and to give a CS+X seminar hosted by Bryan Pardo. Northwestern's newly established CS+X initiative, headed by Kristian Hammond, sets forth an ambitious plan to bridge Computer Science (computers and computational thinking) and other disciplines.


CS+X Seminar Speaker: Prof. Elaine Chew, Professor of Digital Media at Queen Mary University of London, "The Perception and Apperception of Musical Structures"



WHEN:Monday, May 14, 2018
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
WHERE:North Campus Parking Garage/Academic Building, Workspace, 2311 N Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208 map it
AUDIENCE:Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students
CONTACT:Lana Kiperman
lana@eecs.northwestern.edu
CATEGORY:Lectures & Meetings





DESCRIPTION:

The EECS Department welcomes Prof. Elaine Chew, Professor of Digital Media at Queen Mary University of London.

Chew will present a talk entitled "The Perception and Apperception of Musical Structures" on Monday, May 14 at 2:00 PM in The Garage Workroom.

Abstract: Music is regarded by many to be organized sound, sequences of sound that possess coherence or structure at multiple levels that flow smoothly and logically from one state to another. It is the discovery of these structures that enables us to make sense of music. In this talk, I shall discuss the ways in which music makes sense or how we make sense of music, and how computational tools can reveal traces of this musical sense making. The first example will consider the art of sight-reading, and how through transcription, the hesitations and repetitions can be linked to the cognitive processing of music. Next, we shall consider different techniques performers use (accents, timing) to impute perceptible musical structure (chunking, prominence), also evident in the recorded signal, to a music sequence. Long-term coherence remains a common challenge in composition and music generation; here, we examine examples where composers and machines steal structure (rhythm, repetition, tension) from existing pieces of music and extra-musical sources such as abnormal heartbeats. Finally, we move from the music making to the experience of music by its perceivers, where listener annotations of emotion and structure reveal markedly different ways of hearing structure.

Bio: Prof. Elaine Chew is Professor of Digital Media at Queen Mary University of London, where she is affiliated with the Centre for Digital Music. Her research centers on the mathematical modeling and computational analysis of music structures, particularly as they are shaped in expressive performance; more recently, she is applying the techniques to cardiac arrhythmia signal analysis. Her work has been recognized by NSF CAREER/PECASE awards, fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and a new European Research Council Advanced Grant for the project COSMOS (Computational Shaping and Modeling of Musical Structures). Professor Chew received PhD and SM degrees in Operations Research from MIT, a BAS in Mathematical and Computational Sciences (honors) and Music Performance (distinction) from Stanford, and Fellowship and Licentiate diplomas in piano performance from Trinity College, London.


Hosted by CS+X and the MA in Science in Sound Arts and Industries

Friday, May 4, 2018

Stanford CCRMA 2018 Music and the Brain Symposium


I am delighted to be returning to my alma mater 11-12 May 2018 to give a talk and concert at the Music and the Brain Symposium hosted by the Music Engagement Research Initiative at the Stanford Centre for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. The theme of this year's symposium is music performance and expressivity, and the symposium organisers are Jonathan Berger, Noah Fram, Blair Kaneshiro, Zhengshan Shi, and Nette Worthey.

The event is free but registration is required on eventbrite. There is live streaming of the two-day event: [ Day 1 | Day 2 ]. The abstract of my talk and concert program are reproduced below; the concert's program notes are on this blogpost; full program can be found on the event website.

Photos (below): Here I am stealing some time to practice and put the finishing touches on the Arrhythmia Suite for the CCRMA concert while at the Symposium Risset at Ircam in Paris yesterday. John Chowning, inventor of FM synthesis, founder of CCRMA, and close friend of Jean-Claude Risset gave a keynote.





Stanford: CCRMA: Music and the Brain Symposium

 May 11–12, 2018
 CCRMA (The Knoll), 660 Lomita Drive, Stanford University [directions] [map] [register]
 Sponsored by the Scott and Annette Turow Fund





4PM, May 12, 2018

Music performance as problem solving
Elaine Chew — Queen Mary University of London

Music performance, with its on-the-fly decision-making, is considered to be one of the most breathtaking feats of human intelligence. The nature of the creativity in music performance, the reasoning behind the interpretations of a piece of music, and the work performers do to create novel and moving experiences, however, largely remain a mystery. This is partly because there is little in the way of representing, conceptualizing, and talking about the work of performance. Re-framing performance as an act of problem solving, I shall show different ways to represent and conceptualize alternate solutions (interpretations) created in performance; these representations provide concrete measures of the extent to which a performer deforms musical space and time. The techniques will be shown to apply also to electrocardiographic recordings of abnormal heartbeats. Finally, I will propose a theoretical framework for reverse-engineering the thinking behind a performance.




8PM, May 11, 2018

Transformations
Elaine Chew — Piano

Sonata in E-flat, Hob XVI:45, FinaleFranz Josef Haydn
Stolen Rhythm (2009)Cheryl Frances-Hoad/Franz Josef Haydn
Practicing Haydn (2013)Elaine Chew, Peter Child, Lina Viste Grønli
Intermezzo — for Pedja (2015)Jonathan Berger
Three morphed pieces from J.S. Bach's "A Little Notebook for Anna Magdalena" (2016)
Minuet in G – March in D – Bist du bei mir
Dorien Herremans, Elaine Chew
US première
Three morphed pieces from Kabalevsky's "30 and 24 Pieces for Children" (2006)
Clowns – Toccatina – Etude No. 3 in A minor
Dorien Herremans, Elaine Chew
US première
Arrythmia Suite (2017-2018)*
I. 161122 VT before during after ECG
(after Holst's Mars from The Planets)
II. 161102 VT4 before after UNI
(after Chopin's Ballade No. 2)
Elaine Chew, Ashwin Krishna, Daniel Soberanes, Matthew Ybarra, Michele Orini, Pier Lambiase
World première
Ballade No. 2 in F majorFrédéric Chopin

Program Notes