Academic Staff
- HHB730, Hung Hom Bay Campus
- +852 2766 7683
- ivan-yifan.zou@polyu.edu.hk
ORCID ID
SCOPUS IDBiography
My research/teaching mainly focus on the relationship between music and language, with a particular interest in the music-language co-evolution, tone-melody matching in Chinese traditional music/Cantopop, music psychology, and music as cultural identity in Hong Kong. My recent research includes a newly-built Tone-Melody Corpus for Jyutkuk, Naamyam, and Cantopop (TMC-JNC), making it the first attempt to describe the Cantonese tone evolution from a musical perspective in the past century. I am also leading several projects: with one exploring the music along the maritime Silk Road, and another focusing on the inheritance and preservation of Hong Kong guqin music (funded by the Hong Kong Culture Bureau).
Education and Academic Qualifications
- PhD, The University of Hong Kong
- MPhil, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Academic and Professional Experience
- 2023 - Present
Research Assistant Professor, Department of Language Science and Technology, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University - 2021 - 2023
Postdoc Fellow at the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing
Teaching Areas
- Linguistics
- Neurolinguistics
- Psycholinguistics
- Musicology.
Research Interests
Selected Publications
- Zou, I. Y. (under contract). The Art of Being Peripheral: The Evolution and Heritage of Guqin Music in Hong Kong, funded and under the contract by the HKSAR Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau.
- Zou, I. Y. (2026, forthcoming). “Towards a musical understanding of linguistic tone merger: the evolution of tone-melody matching in Cantonese music in the past century.” Submitted to the journal of Psychology of Music.
- Zou, I. Y. (2025). “Hong Kong music literature since Cantopop: The co-evolution of music and literature via tone-melody matching.” journal of Chinese Literature and Culture. 11(2), 255-275
- Zou, I. Y. (2024). The co-evolution of Chinese music and language: The adaptational formant-interval hypothesis and its sex and cross-cultural implications. In J. Kong, G. Peng, Z. Shen, & F. Wang (Eds.), The Festschrift in Honor of Prof. William S-Y. Wang (pp. 187–210). City University of Hong Kong Press.
- Zou, I. Y., Tsai, Y. & Wang, W. S-Y. (2023). The Boundary of Chinese Music: A Cultural and Aesthetic Comparison between Pipa and Guqin. Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture. 9(2), 425-457. https://doi.org/10.1215/23290048-9965671
- Zou, I. Y., & Wang, W. S-Y. (2022). The Musical Language of Yuen Ren Chao: A Cultural and Empirical Study of the Modernization of Chinese Music. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 50(1), 39-61. https://doi.org/10.1353/jcl.2022.0003
- Zou, I. Y., & Wang, W. S-Y. (2021). Music as Social Bonding: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 44, e95, 93-96. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X20001326
- 2022 - 2026
Principal Investigator, The Current State of the Hong Kong Guqin Culture and its Inheritance, Lord Wilson Heritage Trust
