Music to Make the Heart Sing

View an audio-described version of the video here.

Music has the power to move people—to make the heart race and the breath catch. How does it do that?

To find out, Elaine Chew SM ’98, PhD ’00, a concert pianist and professor of engineering at King’s College London, has been developing novel methods for studying music and its physiological impacts. Her work includes musical compositions based on unusual heart rhythms and systems for measuring and analyzing how classical music impacts the heart.

“It’s actually a very challenging problem to try to model music response,” she says. “It’s probably one of the most difficult problems one can choose to tackle in music research.”

Chew earned her undergraduate degree from Stanford, then came to MIT for graduate school—drawn by renowned programs in both operations research (her degree field) and music. For her dissertation, she combined these interests, borrowing a concept from operations research to develop an algorithmic model that shows the chords and keys of music as it is played and reveals the relationships among tonal elements.

After graduation, Chew continued to combine engineering and music as an academic. She earned tenure at the University of Southern California in 2007, and she moved to England in 2011 to join the faculty of Queen Mary University of London.  

Then, in 2016, Chew underwent cryoablation for atrial fibrillation—only two years after radiofrequency ablation in 2014 for supraventricular tachycardia—and developed a new academic interest: the heart. Fascinated by the irregular heartbeat patterns of arrythmia, she began by creating music using those beats. This work enabled her to give doctors a new, aural way to understand heart rhythms—which are typically studied through the visual medium of an electrocardiogram.

Next, she began collaborating with doctors to investigate how music impacts heart health. One of the software applications she initiated during a three-year stint at the French research institutions CNRS/IRCAM—Heart.FM—records physiological signals while a person listens to music to assess the effects on such unconscious processes as heartbeat and blood pressure.

This work may one day make it possible to develop individually tailored music-based therapies and diagnostics for cardiovascular diseases or cardiovascular health, says Chew, who joined the permanent faculty at King’s in 2022 and now holds joint appointments in the Department of Engineering and the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences’ Department of Cardiovascular Imaging.

Interested in music at MIT? Learn about the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building, which opens in February.