[Colloq] Fwd: TALK at RADCLIFFE: Elaine Chew & Alexandre François

[Rachel Kalweit]

Please forward this to anyone who may be interested in attending - thank you! 


ELAINE CHEW & ALEXANDRE FRANÇOIS 

Analytical Listening through Interactive Visualization 

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 
3:30 PM 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study 
Fellowship Program 
Radcliffe Gym 
10 Garden Street, Cambridge 


Chew and François form the Analytical Listening Through Interactive Visualization cluster at the Radcliffe Institute. Their goal is to make accessible discerning music listening by creating interactive and scientific visualizations of musical structures, abstracted from music streams in real time. Their MuSA.RT system, based on Chew's spiral array model for tonality, and implemented using François' Software Architecture for Immersipresence (SAI), has been featured in their multimedia performance-conversation, The Mathematics in Music, to be repeated at MIT later this Spring. At Radcliffe, they are refining and expanding upon the MuSA.RT project, and generating and recording visual analyses of musical pieces. Their fellows' presentation will include an introduction to the field of music and computing, and feature a live demonstration of MuSA.RT. 

As an operations researcher, Elaine Chew designs mathematical models and computational techniques to analyze music and its performance; as a pianist, she performs widely as a proponent of contemporary eclectic repertoire. She is an associate professor at the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), where she was the first honoree of the Viterbi Early Career Chair. At USC, she founded and heads the Music Computation and Cognition Laboratory. Her current preoccupations include writing articles to help bridge the mathematical/computational and musical communities, editing (with Alfred Cramer and Christopher Raphael) a special issue on computation for the Journal of Mathematics and Music, chairing (with Juan Pablo Bello) the program for the 2008 International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, and compiling sketches for a series of books on computational models for music analysis. 

Chew earned a BAS in mathematical and computational sciences (honors) and music (distinction) from Stanford University and PhD and SM degrees in operations research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Awards and support for her work include the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering and the National Science Foundation Early Career and Information Technology Research grants. Chew holds Fellowship and Licentiate diplomas in piano performance from Trinity College, London. In 1998, she received MIT's Laya and Jerome Wiesner Student Art Award, after which she served as an affiliated artist in MIT's music and theater arts section. For 2007-2008, Chew was also awarded a Fulbright to visit the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique in Paris, France. 

Alexandre R. J. François is a research assistant professor of computer science at the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). His research centers on the creating of human-centered formalisms and tools to facilitate the design and implementation of complex, dynamic software systems that span domains of applications that traditionally employ different computation and representation models. François is the creator of the SAI, a software architecture model for designing, analyzing and implementing complex software systems. His Modular Flow Scheduling Middleware (MFSM, mfsm.sourceforge.net) provides an open-source implementation of SAI's abstractions. The SAI/MFSM framework has enabled the creation of numerous innovative research and teaching projects in computer vision, music, graphics and video games. Leveraging the SAI/MFSM framework, his experimental graduate and undergraduate courses in software development pool the efforts of the entire class on a single, ambitious collaborative project. 

François received the diplôme d'ingénieur from the Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon in 1993; the diplôme d'études approfondies (MS) from the University Paris IX-Dauphine in 1994; and MS and PhD degrees in computer science from USC in 1997 and 2000, respectively. From 2001 to 2004, he was a research associate at USC's Integrated Media Systems Center and USC's Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems. At Radcliffe, François is concurrently investigating similarities between auditory and visual cognitive processes. 


For more information, call the Institute Reception Desk, 617-495-8212. 
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Melissa Synnott 
Administrator for Fellows 
Radcliffe Fellowship Program 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study 
617-496-0105