Yiqing Ma

Yiqing Ma is a music theorist, ethnographer, and carillonneur. Yiqing's research focuses on critical approaches to timbre and voice in Japanese music, East Asian languages and popular culture, global history of music theory exchanges, and music cognition. 

She has published articles and conference papers on gender performance in Japanese popular music, timbre in Japanese and Chinese music theory, and meanings in music affects. Her current research explores how vocal timbre facilitates the construction of gender identities in Japanese popular music, which received the Komar Award from Music Theory Midwest. Her recent empirical work focuses on emotional perceptions of lyrics, published in Musicae Scientiae. Her forthcoming book chapter that focuses on translating Japanese timbre theory will appear in Translating the Field: Music, Power, Praxis. Ma currently serves as the editorial assistant at Music Perception. 

She received her Ph.D. in Music Theory from the University of Michigan in 2025. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Music from the University of Minnesota, where she co-authored Basic Music Technology: An Introduction (2018, Springer) with her colleagues there. Her current book project, tentatively titled Gendering Voice in Modern Japan, interrogates the relation between music and social structural power that revealed through the beliefs, pedagogy, and policies around vocality, tracing how “feminine” voices evolve, challenge, and respond to shifting understandings of gender performance in post-war Japan. 

As a carillon performer-composer, Yiqing actively performed in regular recitals in Ann Arbor, Michigan, from 2021–2025. Her original composition, The Stream Flows (2025), was awarded the performance prize by the Franco Composition Contest from the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America (GCNA). Her research project that studies Bianzhong (Chinese set-bells) repertoire, techniques, tunings, and scales to develop techniques for adapting its repertoire to the carillon has received the Ronald Barnes Memorial Research Fund in 2021. Yiqing is an Associate Carillonneur member of GCNA.