Ph.D. Student UC Riverside, Digital Composition | MS. University of Southern California, Music Industry | B.B.A The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Global Business Studies with Finance minor
Composer
electroacoustic + experimental-electronic + Rock n’ Roll + ultra-fusion with world instruments
SuperCollider - Csound - Music_Production - Mixing+Mastering - Ableton_Live - Novel_Sampling - Musique_Conrete - Algorithmic_Composition - Live_Electronics - Real_time_Generated_Sound - Sound_Art - Sonic_InstallationResearcher
ethnomusicology + speech, language and music + MIR + music industry
Physical_Modelling_of_World_Instrument: San_Xian - Khoomei: Mongolian_Throat_Singing - Hubei_Folk Music - phonetic-based_music - music_assets_financing - alternative_and_world_popular_artist _recommendation_systemPianist
improvisation + free jazz + atonality + chinese folk + rock piano
Jerry Lee Lewis - Vyacheslav Ganelin - Witold Lutoslawski - Sergei Prokofiev - Nikolai Kapustin - Little Richard - Fats Domino - Friedrich Gulda - Ludwig Van Beethoven
Selected Projects
「Turn Right」
Turn Right is an experimental electronic album, fully composed, produced, recorded, and with every track of instruments played by Yudan Zou, endeavours to achieve the fusion of Rock, Atonality, ethnomusicology and electroacoustic. The track A Matter of Safety was featured on ATTN magazine, Resonance Extra by Music Journalist Jack Chuter.
Music Scoring for Children’s Picture Book
I worked as a composer and music narrative design for children’s picture book by early 2021. Based on stories, I composed music for the corresponding plots, vibes, and emotions. I was also in charged of the production/recording process in the pre-publishing phase. Below tracks were selected samples from.
Dasein
This is an interactive sample-based electronics + improvisation live performanceIn 2019 Feb and 2019 March, I hosted two live shows in Ham & Eggs Tavern DTLA and 191 Space Guangzhou, presenting my album Turn Right.
Digital Rock Heritage: Machine Learning Lyrics Generation of Lou Reed
Lou Reed, the frontman of The Velvet Underground, pioneer of experimental rock music, has always been my biggest music influence. Other than his music, the verbally bold, stream-of-consciousness, delmore schwartz-influenced lyrics of his compelled me to study the interactional influence that speech had in lyrical music. As the legend passed away, I think it’s important to pay tribute to contemporary rock music genres by keeping a digital musicology database. For creative use, I apply Markov Chain model to generate Lou Reed’s lyrics in his style.
SanXian Simulation application
The SanXian (Chinese: 三弦, literally “three strings”) is a three-stringed traditional Chinese lute. It has a long fretless fingerboard, and the body is traditionally made from snake skin stretched over a rounded rectangular resonator. This project tries to simulate the sound of San Xian as well as provide users the experience of playing San Xian with keyboard interface. For acoustic audio feature capturing, Sanxian samples from DCMI database were examined using Librosa (python) code. Lower level audio features such as MFCC were examined for spectrum analysis. Finalization of audio code was completed in JUCE.
Integrated Composition: Electroacoustic & Computer Music
I compose electronic music using Csound, SuperCollider for ‘wave’ generation and algorithmic composition, and Ableton Live for sample-based Musique Concrete. In this realm of work, I hope to include more novel samples: non-English phonetics, social-political-samplings (eg. political speeches), ethnomusicological elements (Sanxian, Khoomei, Jaw Harp, folk music..etc.)
Yudan Zou 