Picture this: you are sat in the front row of a concert with a grand piano before you, a virtuoso pianist masterfully gliding their fingers across the keys. The boom of the music fills the room, and you’re lost in the melody.
Except you’re not at a concert at all. You’re in a laboratory with pianist, operations researcher and Professor of Engineering, Professor Elaine Chew, playing music whilst you are strapped to machines monitoring your heart, blood pressure and breathing. Chew is using this to measure the effects of the music on your cardiovascular system, observing mathematical and computational modelling of musical structures and physiological signals; paving the way for music-based cardiovascular therapies and diagnostics, which she calls music “theranostics".
Journey to music and science
Chew is one of millions of people with arrythmia, a heart condition where there is an abnormal rate or rhythm of the heartbeat. While she does not consider it a disability, it has had a substantial effect on her.
“So much of my life was trying to figure out how to make it stop, how to make it slow down,” she says, and notes how she would have to stop certain activities, such as swimming, whenever she experienced an episode.
Born to mathematician parents in New York, Chew began her musical journey in Singapore at the age of six. By the time she was just sixteen, she had made it to the concerto finals of Singapore’s first major international piano competition. She went on to double major in mathematical and computational sciences and music at Stanford University, later combining the two during post-graduate research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She completed her PhD thesis in just two years, focussing on mathematical modelling of music and proposing one of the most successful mathematical models for tonal perception, called the spiral array.
Surgery and path to cardiac research
In the 1990s, doctors started using radiofrequency waves to zap misbehaving heart tissues to treat arrhythmias. In these early days, while at Stanford, Elaine was given the option of having the procedure that came with a chance of needing a pacemaker, which she initially turned down. However in 2014, after having her symptoms exacerbated by pregnancy while at Harvard, she did undergo radiofrequency ablation, which helped to reestablish a normal heart rhythm. “I didn't realise how much of my life had been built around anticipating and avoiding the arrhythmia until it was gone,” she says.
Two years later, Chew developed atrial fibrillation, a different type of arrhythmia, and underwent further treatment which sparked her interest in cardiology. She jumped at the chance to ask her cardiologist for her cardiac signals to analyse and begin using mathematical and computational tools to research music and the heart. She explains that in her music technology research she works with signals all the time. “I loved seeing all the signals in the catheterisation lab and seeing the insights of your heart and all the signals it was producing,” she said. She recognised that the same analytical tools designed for music would also work on cardiovascular signals.
A conversation with the doctor assisting her procedure, on how some music could mimic arrhythmias, prompted Chew to devise a method to make music that exactly matches an ECG sequence. She recalls thinking “if I should live through this, I am going to make this music”.
Silver linings
Despite the challenges that come with having arrhythmia, Chew also speaks of the positives.
“I don't feel like my heart condition has held me back from my research,” she says, “If anything, it's given me time to do the research”. Debilitating symptoms of atrial fibrillation forced her to take a significant amount of time off work, which, she adds, “was very good for thinking, making new ideas, and I think maybe all of us should have more of such moments to reflect, maybe minus the arrhythmia”.
Without the arrhythmia and resulting experiences, Chew says she would not be doing this research. “It has taken me to places I would not have dreamed of. I am thrilled to be doing this work”.
