Ko-Hua Hung is a PhD student in Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Davis. She earned an MA in Musicology from National Taiwan University (2018) with Professor Yamauchi Fumitaka. Her research examines how technologically mediated sound shapes identity and structures the relationship between musicians and audiences in popular music. Her conference papers include “Sounding Taiwanese Identity: Lim Giong’s Electronic Dance Music Album Insects Awaken” (IMS Congress 2017, individual paper presenter) and “Alternative Expressions of Chineseness: Dow Wei’s Electronic Dance Music” (accepted as individual paper presenter for SEM 2024 and IASPM 2025).

Since entering the PhD program, she has developed two interdisciplinary projects that extend her work beyond popular music into sound studies and audiovisual media. The first investigates how individuals construct narrative through sound when encountering silent visual sequences, using small-scale experiments, analysis of sound designs, and interview data to theorize “sound as narrative” and cross-modal narrative formation. The second is a sound-analysis study of the film-opera Madame Butterfly (1995), examining how post-production sound constructs cultural meaning in operatic cinema. Together, these projects form the foundations she intends to deepen in doctoral research.