Spring 2024 NMCC Shelfie: Annie Liu
Annie Liu (she/her) is a third-year Musicology, MM Bassoon Performance master’s student and an NMCC recipient. Liu is graduating from UO in June 2024 and starting a PhD in musicology at Princeton this fall.
Profile
Liu’s current research focuses on voice, timbre, and politics in Chinese popular music from 1920–1980. She uses digital tools, like Sonic Visualizer, to create spectrograms or visual ways of representing the signal strength over time at various frequencies present in a particular waveform.
Early in her program, she became interested in music and the Internet/social media, leading her to the NMCC. She wanted to learn about digital humanities and making musicology public and accessible. Liu always wanted to take courses outside of music to meet faculty and students across campus.
Liu received a Student Presentation Award for the ACTOR Y6 Workshop and will present a chapter from her master’s thesis about shidaiqu vocal timbre. She also co-authored a paper on Peking opera vocal timbre with her advisor, Zachary Wallmark, and it is to be published in Music & Science in the coming months.
Looking ahead, Annie Liu envisions her website, shanghaisong.org, as a dynamic and interactive platform. This space will not only serve as a repository for songs but also foster collaboration among scholars interested in the genre or the time period. Her aspiration is to create a vibrant academic community that thrives on shared knowledge and collaboration.
Recommendations
Reading:
- The Science-Music Borderlands, a recently published collection of essays from scholars in various disciplines who are all studying music
Resources:
- Musicology Now
- Women’s Song Forum
- SOMD Professor Steve Rodger’s Art Song Augmented
- Sounding Out!
- the ACTOR Project’s Timbre and Orchestration Resource
