Yunxuan (Luana) Chen (she/her) is a music researcher and writer from Shanghai, China, currently pursuing her PhD in Music Theory at Western University, where she also earned her MA in the same field. Prior to that, she completed a master’s degree in Compositional Theory from East China Normal University, along with a bachelor’s degree in Musicology from the same institution. She is a recipient of the prestigious China National Scholarship—a highly competitive academic award granted to the top 1% of graduate students nationwide for outstanding academic and research performance—and graduated with distinction. 

In recent years, she relocated to Canada to further her academic pursuits. Her research lies at the intersection of music and philosophy, with particular interests in critical theory, sound studies, and the intellectual legacy of the Frankfurt School. She is currently working on the methodological and philosophical dimensions of music-analytical thought, especially focusing on the metatheoretical foundations of transformational theory and its relation with phenomenology. She also critically examines the contemporary and potential significance of this so-called “transformational thinking” within music theory, exploring how it might still resonate amid broader ”transformations“ in the arts, culture, and technology, and offer a lasting way of engaging with art in a time of change.

Alongside her scholarly pursuits, Yunxuan has long been engaged in writing work, especially during the pre-AI era—a time when information through language still felt materially anchored in human labor. From 2020 to 2024, she regularly contributed commissioned reviews of Naxos CD Recordings to Music Lover Magazines. She also worked in the media department of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra over several summer seasons (2019, 2021–2024), where she wrote concert coverage and festival features that sought to capture not only the sound, but the atmosphere and affect of live performance.

As the landscape of writing continues to shift with the rise of generative AI, she remains committed to thinking through language—and to reimagining what it means to be both a music researcher and a writer in changing times.

This website gathers fragments of her work and thought. It is a space for learning, reflection, and writing in progress: bringing together her thinking on music, philosophy, art, poetry, religion and culture, whether resonant or simply of personal interest.​ It includes her ongoing projects and public-facing activities through which she engages with the changing world. These activities not only trace the unfolding arc of her creative and intellectual life, but also open spaces where her work meets the movements of the wider world. It also offers a glimpse of her Another Face: a quieter lens on the world, expressed through small details and moments from everyday life, captured through her photography. It also reaches outward to the vastness of the cosmos, the orbits of planets, and the silence of deep-sky.

(Her academic Curriculum Vitae is available here.)