Current Graduate Students
Beccy Abraham '26
Rebecca Abraham (Beccy) is a researcher, engineer, and musician-composer. In 2020, they graduated from UC Berkeley, where they studied electrical engineering and computer science. While at UC Berkeley, they worked on the Magical Musical Mat, an interactive musical mat that amplifies physical touch between people through sound for communicative purposes. Now, they're pursuing graduate studies with the goal of creating more ways to share the joy of musical expression. Beccy's primary instrument is the marimba, and they have more than a decade of concert percussion experience. They've played trombone with Cal Band and acted as principal percussionist for the University Wind Ensemble. Beccy is an organizer for Rich Oak Events, a spoken word and literary arts organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In their free time, Beccy enjoys crafting, cooking, and visiting local coffee shops.
Ivy Fu '26
Ivy Fu is a sound artist, curator, and a researcher of surveillance, eavesdropping and sensory spaces currently studying in the Digital Musics program at Dartmouth under Ash Fure and Cesar Alvarez. Using improvisational movements, generative visuals, anti-communicative technology, and homemade circuits, she creates organic sensory dwellings, sentient machines and self-regenerative ecospheres that provide fugitive spaces for identity in crisis, territories that are sonically transgressed, and complex historic and personal narratives that desire to be further examined. She recently completed her first installation as part of the artist duo the universal machine. Their project Ear Zero realized her original prototype of the Deleuzian body without organs, an inverted ear that only annihilates sounds in its listening act, through co-constructing a sentient, womb-like feedback machine. Her works have been featured in The Allen Memorial Museum of Art, Fireland Association of Art, The Shed, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, Hashtag gallery, International Contemporary Ensemble, the She Scores music festival, and Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt.
Natasha Jacobs '28
Natasha Jean Jacobs is a composer, sound designer, writer, and performer with an interdisciplinary practice. Their current focus is on playwriting, screenwriting, and performance art, guided by a sonic compositional approach that shapes the architecture of narrative form.
They are interested in the inherent musicality that emerges from the integration and de-hierarchization of sound elements (dialogue, score, and sound design), sonic subtext, and sound’s embodiment of the trickster archetype to deceive and complicate perception. Recurring themes of mischief, contagion, and magical thinking weave throughout their practice.
Natasha’s work has been described by STEREOGUM as “technically impressive, narratively immersive, tragically funny, and subtly dark,” and by NPR as “almost otherworldly… slightly spooky and often dramatic.”
They have scored and sound-designed films that have won awards at Sundance, SXSW, and other festivals. In 2025, they re-produced and arranged performance artist Frank Maya’s music for Can I Be Frank, an Off-Broadway one-person show directed by Sam Pinkleton and written and performed by Morgan Bassichis, which ran in New York at Soho Playhouse and La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. As a songwriter, Natasha has toured throughout the United States and Canada and released two albums under the moniker Thelma.
Ziaire Trinidad Sherman '28
(Photo By Caleb Monatgue)
Ziaire Trinidad Sherman is a Cincinnati-based Saxophonist and Interdisciplinary Artist whose artistry emanates from the rich tapestry of the black diaspora. By blending futuristic and historical sounds, he weaves captivating narratives that not only capture attention but also invite others on an immersive journey. His distinct approach has earned him victories in beat battles, opportunities to tour across the USA, and leadership roles in international projects hosted at esteemed institutions such as the Fabrica Research Center, MIT Media Lab, and Documenta. Ziaire Trinidad Sherman describes his work as a fusion that brings distant memories to the forefront, achieved through a dialogue between computer-based technology and the resilience of human willpower.
Elyse Tabet '28
Elyse Tabet studies how sound emerges from spaces, energy flows, and the failures of machines. Their practice focuses on synthesized analog sound, field recordings, and the conditions under which different signals shape, modulate, and inhabit bodies. Working with voltage control, playback instability, and live audio, they construct landscapes shaped by displacement, drift, and generative correspondences. Sound is a mutable body, continuously reshaped through interaction, erosion, and re-composition, questioning fixed identities, stable spaces, and linear time.