Ivan Yifan ZOU was a Research Assistant Professor (RAP) in the Department of Language Science and Technology at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University before joining the music department at HKU in 2026 as a visiting RAP. He holds a PhD degree from the department of music at the University of Hong Kong with a dissertation focusing on music psychology. His current research/teaching mainly focus on the relationship between music and language, with a particular interest in the music-language co-evolution, tone-melody matching in Chinese traditional music/Cantopop, music psychology, and music as cultural identity in Hong Kong. He builds a large-scale Tone-Melody Corpus for Jyutkuk, Naamyam, and Cantopop (TMC-JNC), making it the first attempt to describe the Cantonese tone evolution from a musical perspective in the past century. As an active guqin researcher and practitioner he also leads a project on documenting and preserving Hong Kong guqin culture, funded by the Hong Kong Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau.