King’s College London : School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences (Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine) / Department of Engineering (Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences)
Elaine Chew, PI of the ERC project COSMOS, is Professor of Engineering jointly appointed between the Department of Engineering (NMES) and the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences (FoLSM) at King’s College London. An operations researcher and pianist by training, Elaine Chew is a leading authority in music representation, music information research (MIR), and music perception and cognition, and an established performer. A pioneering researcher in MIR, she is forging new paths at the intersection of music and cardiovascular science. Her work has been recognised by the ERC, PECASE, NSF CAREER, and Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowships. She is an alum (Fellow) of the NAS Kavli and NAE Frontiers of Science/Engineering Symposia. Elaine received PhD and SM degrees in Operations Research at MIT, a BAS in Mathematical & Computational Sciences (honours) and Music (distinction) at Stanford, and FTCL and LTCL diplomas in Piano Performance from Trinity College, London.
Courtney Reed, Postdoctoral Researcher, is researching human perception and interaction with music and physiology. Courtney’s specialisations are in human-computer interaction (HCI) and data presentation, particularly with biosignals like EMG, human-centred design, and first-person subjective methodologies, including micro-phenomenology. Courtney completed her PhD in Computer Science with the Augmented Instruments Lab at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London. Her thesis examined the embodied relationship between vocalist and voice, as both instrument and body, and how musical relationships can inform HCI and design strategies. She previously worked as a researcher in the Sensorimotor Interaction Group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, where she is an affiliate researcher. Her work there examined human perception of vibrotactile feedback and developed protoypes and toolkits for designers to incorporate auditory and tactile feedback in interface design. In addition to her research, Courtney works as a semi-professional vocalist in London and abroad.
Mateusz Solinski, Postdoctoral Researcher, is researching the effects of expressive music parameters on autonomic responses and investigating the connections between the perception of music and physiology. Mateusz received his PhD in Physical Sciences at Warsaw University of Technology, Faculty of Physics, Cardiovascular Physics Group. At the same time, he gained experience as Data Scientist in medical companies and start-ups (Medicalgorithmics, AioCare) involved in the development of medical devices and telemedicine systems. He participated in multiple commercial projects, clinical trials and challenges concerning the analysis of multiple electrophysiological signals, particularly ECG and heart rate variability. His PhD thesis focused on the influence of short-term changes in the persistence of the RR time interval series on heart rate variability during sleep.
Katherine Kinnaird, Visiting Senior Lecturer, works at the intersection of machine learning and cultural analytics, specifically concerning music information retrieval and text analysis. Broadly, she researches the dimension reduction problem, representing high-dimensional and noisy sequential data as a low-dimensional object that encodes relevant information. Katherine earned her PhD at Dartmouth College (Hanover NH, USA) in mathematics and proposed the Aligned-Hierarchies for representing all possible musical structure hierarchies aligned on a common-time axis. Currently she is the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Statistical & Data Sciences at Smith College (Northampton MA, USA). During her postdoctoral work at Brown University (Providence RI, USA), she worked with two different faculty members on projects related to health care, and she is looking forward to working with the COSMOS project on statistical and data analyses of music and physiological (cardiovascular) data.
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique : UMR9912 / Sciences et technologies de la musique et du sons (STMS) Labo, Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), Sorbonne Université (EDITE: Informatique, télécommunication et électronique de Paris), Ministère de la Culture
Daniel Bedoya, PhD student, designs citizen science experiments to help understand musical structures created in performance, and analyzes the perception of musical structures in performed music and physiological responses to these performed structures. He has an undergraduate degree in Sound Engineering (UDLA Quito-Ecuador) and a Master’s degree in Computer Science, Acoustics and Signal Processing Applied to Music (ATIAM – IRCAM-Sorbonne Université). Previously, he was a research assistant with Jean-Julien Aucouturier in the Perception and Sound Design (PDS) Team on the relationship of music and emotions in the ERC project CREAM and explored the influence of smiled speech in dyadic interactions in the REFLETS project.
Emma Frid, Postdoctoral Fellow, is a Swedish Research Council International Postdoctoral Scholarship recipient hosted by the COSMOS project at the STMS Laboratory. Emma’s project is titled Accessible digital musical instruments – Multimodal feedback and artificial intelligence for improved musical frontiers for people with disabilities, in the “Medical technology, other medicine and health care” category. The scholarship is administered by the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Emma received her PhD in January 2020 from KTH, in Sound and Music Computing from the Division of Media Technology and Interaction Design. Her PhD thesis, entitled “Diverse Sounds – Enabling Inclusive Sonic Interaction,” focused on how Sonic Interaction Design can be used to promote inclusion and diversity in music-making.
Lawrence Fyfe, Research Engineer, is creating web-based visualisation software and database infrastructure to harness volunteer thinking in the project’s citizen science modules. Lawrence received his PhD in Computational Media Design from the University of Calgary and a Master’s degree in Music, Science and Technology from the Centre for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University. Before joining the COSMOS project, he worked on a binaural telepresence system for the Digiscope project at INRIA. The Digiscope project connected various visualisation labs around Paris via telepresence (audio and video conferencing) to facilitate collaboration. Before that, Lawrence developed a web site for listening to sonified EEG data, which was used to facilitate the diagnosis of epileptic seizures.
Emily Graber, Postdoctoral Fellow, is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow whose Ear Stretch project investigates the role of active tempo control in augmenting enjoyment of contemporary music as measured by physiological monitoring. After studying violin performance at the University of Michigan, Emily received her PhD at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in 2018. Her doctoral research with Takako Fujioka focused on how performers and listeners anticipate and experience musical tempo changes. Her dissertation, “Neural Correlates of Top-Down Musical Temporal Processing,” examined the process of temporal anticipation with neuroimaging. Following her PhD, Emily was a postdoctoral fellow at the Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto, where she examined how interactive musical training assists in rehabilitating speech processing in deaf adults with cochlear implants.
Corentin Guichaoua, Postdoctoral Researcher, is researching mathematical and computational techniques for automatic extraction of musical structure in performed music and cardiac signals. Previously, he was a postdoc with Moreno Andreatta at the University of Strasbourg in the SMIR project, where he implemented algebraic and topologic methods for systematic analysis and comparison of pieces of music. He holds PhD and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from the University of Rennes 1, and a concurrent Masters of Science and Engineering (Diplôme d’Ingénieur) from INSA (Institut national des sciences appliquées). His doctoral thesis, supervised by Frédéric Bimbot, focused on compressed descriptions of chord sequences from pieces of music using formal models, in order to extract information on their structure.
Paul Lascabettes, PhD student, is an ENS (Ecole normale supérieure Paris-Saclay) CDSN scholarship student hosted by the ERC ADG project COSMOS who recently joined the team. Paul completed a Masters in the ATIAM (IRCAM’s Masters degree in Acoustics, Signal Processing, and Computer Science Applied to Music) Program. As part of his Mathematics studies at the ENS Paris-Saclay, he recently concluded a year-long research exchange at the MARC Institute for Brain, Behaviour, and Development in the Western Sydney University in Australia, where he worked on computational pattern detection for the analysis of the fugues of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier with Andrew Milne and David Bulger.
Charles Picasso, Heart.FM Engineer, is responsible for creating an app to deliver personalized music therapy to lower blood pressure based on physiological feedback. He has previously spent nine years at IRCAM working as a software engineer and contributed to OpenSource projects such as SuperCollider. Picasso is also an electronic music composer and sound designer. Classically trained as a musician, he started early as an electronic music producer and work as a composer for theatre companies, documentaries, films and exhibitions. His artistic work focus on abstract electronic soundscapes and is inspired by generative and experimental processes. His music is often depicted as contemplative and melancholic.
Gonzalo Romero, ATIAM (IRCAM’s Masters degree in Acoustics, Signal Processing, and Computer Science Applied to Music) intern (Feb 2020-Sep 2020), is developing scalable algorithms for the automatic transcription of rhythmic variations, and applying the computational techniques to create symbolic representations of long arrhythmia ECG sequences for structural analysis. He received a Masters in Fundamental Mathematics at the Sorbonne University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Complutense University in Madrid, and a Bachelor’s degree in Composition from the Madrid Royal Conservatory (Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid). Gonzalo hails from a musical family and plays the violin and piano.
Collaborators
The Centre for Translational Electrophysiology and Data Science led by Prof. Pier Lambiase—Professor of Cardiology at UCL’s Institute for Cardiovascular Science and Barts Heart Centre (BHC), Co-Director of Cardiovascular Research at Barts NHS Trust, and BHRS Committee Research Lead; member of the European Society of Cardiology and International Heart Rhythm Society clinical guideline committees—and BHC Electrophysiology Researchers, including Prof. Peter Taggart, Drs Ross Hunter (AF Lead) & Michele Orini (Research Associate).
