Jiang Mingming HKUST BAAS

Music, the harmonic medium, vibrates in my veins. The beating reflected off the drumheads, the melody touching the heart. The fact that I am a percussionist and a vocalist, the swinging of the drumsticks, and the sweat bouncing off the microphone made me who I am.

Through all those times, music are an inseparable part of my life. From that lullaby my mother sang, the self-actualization verse of Dire Straits, to the inexorable fate in O Fortuna of the Great Carmina Burana, the flow of this harmony is unforgettable to me. I joined the Beijing 57 High School Golden Sail Marching Band – the best student marching band in Mainland China – as a percussionist, then joined the Tsinghua University High School Music Specialty Class, where I practised music theory and improved my rudimentary percussion skills. At Beijing Etown Academy (BJEA), I created rock bands, formulated musical alliances, and founded the first-ever school music festivals. My band is invited to various events, such as Opening Ceremonies and Carnivals. Aside from music, I am also familiar with stage equipment. Experience gathered from stages provided me with lores to mobilize speakers, lights, audio deck and more. I have been the Chief Stage engineer since my marching band years and still carried that title in multiple events in BJEA, such as graduation ceremonies and coming-to-age ceremonies, drama festivals, and talent shows.

Carrying my gift, I began to explore the intersection between Music and Computer Science, especially AI. From one of the best Voice synthesizer project VITS (The Conditional Variational Autoencoder with Adversarial Learning for End-to-End Text-to-Speech), to the wonderful voice convention project SoftVC, also there are MIDI Generating projects like REMI (REvamped MIDI-derived events) and Text to music generative protects like Musicgen by Facebook. These interdisciplinary courses solidified my belief in joining the inevitable tide of the Artificial Intelligence Revolution. HKUST is a school not only because of its academic excellence but also because of diversity and inclusiveness. With the chance the school is willing to provide me, I shall put my dedication and talent into creating a musical environment that students love and want.