NCID-2836
Julie Zhu
President's Postdoctoral Fellow & Assistant Professor of Music
University of Michigan
Education/Degree:
1 Music Composition Music Composition (Stanford University)
About
Julie Zhu is a composer, artist, and carillonist. Her work is conceptual and transdisciplinary, operating on an expansive definition of algorithm. Zhu has written for and performed with various contemporary music ensembles and soloists, including Wu Wei, Marco Fusi, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, JACK quartet, Quasar, Line Upon Line, Semblance, and Dal Niente. In the last year, premieres have been presented by Radio France, Sansusī Festival, nonclassical, 3537, and Fondation Royaumont.
Zhu recently completed her DMA in music composition from the Department of Music and Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University and is currently a research fellow at the University of Michigan on music and AI. She is also a graduate of the Cursus in Computer Music at IRCAM in Paris, Hunter College (MFA in combined media), the Royal Carillon School in Mechelen, Belgium (Licentiate), and Yale University (BA mathematics, BA art).
Current Work
Music is touted as “universal” under a rhetoric of neutrality, but it is fundamentally a social behavior—there is the impartial sound wave, yes, but there is also how we think about it, what we do with it, and what socially recognized meanings we may assign to it. Today, non-human processes such as AI and automation curate and analyze our music, but their reliance in training data upon historical biases perpetuates oppressive relations connecting music and meaning. In my research, I hope to acknowledge the breadth of diversity in music by equally attending to a best-practice list of categories beyond the well-trodden formal analyses, implicating a social and ethical dimension to music that is direly needed in scholarship and practice, as well as develop methodologies for inclusive AI in music.
Research Area Keyword(s)
Music Composition, AI, Music Technology