Zih-Syuan Lin is a second-year PhD student in Music Technology at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music, working with Ichiro Fujinaga in the Distributed Digital Music Archives and Libraries Laboratory (DDMAL). Her current research focuses on piano music transcription, particularly MIDI-to-score conversion and score quality evaluation. She is interested in how notation, engraving, and typesetting communicate musical relationships, and how computational evaluation can account for multiple valid ways of notating the same music.

She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management from National Tsing Hua University, where she worked on data analysis and machine-learning applications in manufacturing. From 2023 to 2025, she was a research assistant in the Music and Culture Technology Lab at Academia Sinica, working with Li Su. Her work included orchestral texture classification, the creation and annotation of the S3 symbolic symphony dataset, and musical case studies for motif discovery.

At DDMAL, she works on music encoding and software for historical notation. She has designed a digital font for Hufnagel notation and contributed to its support in the Neon editor and Verovio engraving library. This work involves translating musical and notational requirements into decisions about glyph design, encoding, and software behaviour.

Alongside her research, she composes and arranges Mandarin pop songs with GuguDrive Band and writes instrumental music. Her creative work includes arranging for voice and string ensembles and preparing scores for performers. These practical experiences inform her interest in the relationship between digital music representations and the scores musicians read and perform.