Princeton Composition PhD, Portfolio
1. Sonata for the Body in Three-Part Time
8-channel audio, 3-channel video, installation, performance
Sonata for the Body in Three-Part Time is a room-sized multimedia installation of three intertwined compositional works, using math, astronomy, and music theory to explore my relationship to trans embodiment in past, present, and future time. This work also includes two essays and a collection of poems.
Past. RANDOM WALK. A composition of 19 movements for two pianos across time, composed by performing the mathematical process of a 'random walk' on 19 classical piano pieces I played as a child. This work explores my childhood spent playing piano in a conservatory setting, performing gender, race, and music. I published and presented a first-author paper on this work at Bridges Math Art 2025.
Present. Asterisms. A quadraphonic composition for snare drums, tracking my testosterone shots and menstrual periods against the visibility of ancient Chinese constellations in the sky. These three bodily cycles are sonified across one full calendar year. This work explores the multiple societal binaries in which I exist as a duality.
Future. Modal Mixture. Ongoing choice-based aleatoric composition, beginning with participants' drawings on a grid-layout of modal 7th chords. This work explores names as future containers for the body, through analogy to the multiple possible formats for music notation and recording.
This work was presented at Parsons School of Design in May 2024 as part of the Design & Technology Pop-Up Thesis Show. I am the sole creator of all elements. No AI was used in the creation of this work.
2. EMLang
2023
multimedia
EMLang is a speculative body of work — spanning video, audio, graphics, text and performance — exploring a fictive field of linguistics and art arising entirely from a constructed alien language which uses the hydrogen atom as its organizing principle. Contrary to human language, whose bodily medium is mainly sound, EMLang and its speakers make use of color, sound and haptics. How would this multi-modal language be compressed into a written form? How would we, as sonic interlocutors, interpret this language within the limits of our bodies? How would we apply our theories, academics, and technologies to the unfurling of this language?
One potential answer is explored in Linguistic Singularity Emergence (LSE), a ritual performance combining digital and embodied forms of human and alien language to reach "linguistic thought-space convergence": a unison of abstract meaning, arising from disparate methods of concrete articulation. Through LSE and other works, EMLang investigates the effect of language on culture, gender, and possibilities of self; the use of embodiment to produce new linguistic meaning through multisensorial experience; and the essential human drive to identify, understand, and communicate with beings we deem alien. Along the way, EMLang also uses its speculative academic framing to gently satirize academic language and communication.
All works of EMLang are presented diagetically as part of a fictional in-world conference, "the 36th Annual Intraplanetary Conference on EMLang Linguistics and Intersentient Communications."
This work will be presented at Connecticut College in March 2026, as part of the 18th Ammerman Center Triennial Symposium on Arts and Technology. I am the sole creator of all elements. No AI was used in the creation of this work.
LSE performers include: Amritha Anupindi, Putri Kumalaratri, Lila Feldman, Florencia Lechin, Nancy Wei, Rachel Gorman, Marquise Williams, Lucie Chantepie, Reshma Thomas, and myself.
3. UNVEXED CONFORMAL BODIES
2023
installation, performance
UNVEXED CONFORMAL BODIES is a devised musical system of instruments, notation, and performance, taking formal and structural inspiration from the 92 Johnson Solids (mathematical polyhedra) and aesthetic inspiration from gay and queer leather culture.
The first composition in this system, Body Feelings Op. 1 No. 1, explores my experience of my first two years of transition, using body-related journal excerpts and photos of my body as compositional material. This composition acts as a personal reflection and a newfound understanding of my bodily journey of those first two years.
The notation quilt maps specific journal excerpts and bodily photos to the faces/vertices of the instruments. I then assigned each journal/photo a representative phrase. The composition was notated using these representative phrases to record the sequence of instrumental faces to strike or strings to pluck. The notation therefore takes the form of repeated phrases strung together, as a quasi-poem. I distributed these notation-poems as programs for the performance of Body Feelings, Op. 1 No. 1.
This work was originally presented at Parsons School of Design in May 2023 as a two-day, self-organized pop-up show, for a total of 4 performances. I also published and presented a first-author paper on this work at Bridges Math Art 2024. I am the sole creator of all elements. Some documentation photos were taken by Cathy Li. No AI was used in the creation of this work.
UCB was also featured in Make Magazine’s Make: Wearable Electronics, 2nd Edition, published in February 2025. The custom body harness includes two contact mics underneath each wooden instrument, wired to XLR connectors in the back. The stringed metal instrument is amplified by two contact mics attached to the metal body.
Note: due to audio equipment malfunctions, I was unable to capture the audio directly, so this video contains audio from the camera.