Elaine Chew and Gérard Assayag give invited lectures 10:30am-12pm on Friday morning, 30 May 2025, at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Elaine speaks on music expressivity and its effect on the heart in a lecture entitled, “At the Heart of Music Expressivity.” Gérard speaks on human-machine co-creativity in a lecture titled, “Symbolic Interaction and Cocreativity.” Many thanks to Qianyu Zhang for arranging and documenting!
The announcements on WeChat:
The original English titles and bios are:
At the Heart of Musical Expression
Elaine Chew (周瑜年), King’s College London
Elaine Chew is Professor of Engineering at King’s College London, jointly appointed in the Department of Engineering and School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences. An operations researcher and pianist by training, Elaine is a pioneering researcher in music information research, focussing on mathematical representations and computational techniques for decoding expressive musical structures. She is forging new paths at the intersection of music and cardiovascular science, applying MIR techniques to music-heart-brain interaction and computational arrhythmia research. Elaine founded the Music Theranostics Lab at King’s, where she directs research on music-based digital therapeutics and precision diagnostics. Her research has been recognised by the European Research Council (ERC) — through the projects COSMOS (Computational Shaping and Modeling of Musical Structures) and HEART.FM (Maximizing the Therapeutic Potential of Music through Tailored Therapy with Physiological Feedback in Cardiovascular Disease). It has also been honoured by the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award, (Harvard) Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowships, and the Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year 2023 (Art & Science).
Symbolic Interaction and Cocreativity
Gerard Assayag, IRCAM
Gérard Assayag has founded and currently heads the Music Representation Group at IRCAM STMS Lab, and he also directed the lab from 2011 to 2017, overseeing research policies at the national and international level.. He was involved in the creation of international research institutions s.a. Sorbonne’s AI and Music Institutes, the French Music Informatics Association, the Journal and Society of Mathematics and Computation in Music, or the Sound and Music Computing International Conference. Interested in Machine Musicianship, the modeling of musical behavior from a spectrum of interdisciplinary views, Assayag has defined through numerous publications and successful technologies (OpenMusic, OMax, Somax & co) the concept of symbolic interaction to account for rich and versatile human/machine musical dialog, laying ground to the CoCreativity concept he fostered for next-generation interactive AI in the arts. Assayag holds the prestigious European Research Council Advanced Grant, awarding his research career achievement and vision for the future through the project REACH (Raising Co-Creativity in Cyber-Human Musicianship). REACH features an international team over three continents and develops new theory and tools for Artificial Creative Intelligence in Music.
