As a concert pianist, Elaine Chew knows about performing.  As an engineer, she knows about technology.  And with her technology in the Expression Synthesis Project (ESP), the rest of us get to know a little about performing.

 

ESP allows anyone who can drive to perform a piece of music.  With a steering wheel, foot pedals and a twisting road unfolding on a video screen, the ESP interface looks like something from a videogame arcade. 

 

Foot pedals control volume and tempo while buttons on the steering wheel let you sustain notes or crisply cut them off.  The road that you navigate with the steering wheel corresponds to the musical structure of the piece.   It cues you, suggesting when to slow down or speed up.

 

 “USC is fast becoming one of the places that truly fosters interactions between the arts and humanities, and science and engineering,” she says.  “ESP employs engineering tools to help people understand what performers do when they communicate with music.”

 

Chew, an assistant professor in the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering who holds the Viterbi Early Career Chair, is also a practicing concert pianist.  She joined the Viterbi School in 2001 because she found it “an excellent home for interdisciplinary research, a place that wouldn’t just pay lip service to my kind of work, but welcome it warmly.”

 

The National Science Foundation supported her goals first with an Early Career Award followed by a prestigious PECASE (Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers) Award, the eighth PECASE held by young faculty at the Viterbi School.

 

Born in Buffalo, N.Y., Chew lived in Singapore most of her childhood, where she received conservatory-level music training and diplomas, before returning to the United States to study music, mathematics and engineering. She majored in music and computational mathematics as an undergraduate at Stanford, and earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. in operations research at MIT. 

 

“Analogies in oral communication for questions we ask include: what makes one standup comic funnier than another? What makes a Shakespeare performance more powerful than the next?” she says.  “Today, we can apply scientific tools and analysis to things we have taken for granted, or done by instinct.  The results of these studies will allow more people to understand, and participate in, the creative process.