Mercury Music Foundation

Yang Zhang has a versatile career with decades of cross-sectional experience in music, content development, and the technology-driven entrepreneurial landscape. As a composer and music creator in the production field, she has developed her own conceptual system called “style blending.”

Style-blending features a multi-layered musical architecture that systematically infuses a variety of elements, representing the most distinct music genres, to create a uniquely blended music taste that resonates with the most sophisticated and sensitive emotions with a touch of futuristic music production. She is an active professional working at the frontline of the music industry and is a voting member of the Emmy Music Peer Group. Back in 2009, as an Electronic music pioneer in China, her first electronic music E.P. was published by China Universal Record, which was immediately acclaimed by U.K. music producer Guy Sigsworth. In 2011, she signed with a New York-based music publisher Ed Steigner and furthered her music publishing deal with Los Angeles-based music publisher Andrew Robbins in 2016.

With more than one decade of music production experience crossing electronic music, a dynamic range of film scoring, trailer music production, and global music, she won the Best Original Music for the 2016 Montreal “View Of The World” film & music festival for her album” The World Is A Retro.” She was nominated for the 2021 Hollywood Music In Media Awards for Best Instrumental (“Recall Of The Fallen Empire”). She also won the best Sci-fi/Fantasy music genre for the 13th Hollywood Music In Media Awards in 2022(“The Lord Of The Flame),” after the success of her award-winning album titled “The Hard-boiled Wonderland and The End of Flame” , awarded Bronze Medal at 2022 Global Music Awards.

As a tech-driven startup founder and entrepreneur, she launched a new A.I. music startup, Mercury Orbit Music. At the beginning of 2017, she led her interdisciplinary team comprising A.I. music scientists, programmers, and Grammy-nominated musicians to participate in XPRIZE. As a result, Mercury Orbit Music was recognized as the only startup related to A.I. music among the top 30 A.I. technologies by XPRIZE in 2018. In 2019, her team was invited to demonstrate novel A.I. music technology at the A.I. For a Good summit in Geneva, organized by the United Nations, ITU, and XPRIZE. In 2020, she was selected as the 2020 TedX Talk Speaker to demonstrate her innovative journey transforming from a musician to a self-learned coder. At the end of 2020, her startup was chosen as one of the top 11 Ed-tech startups by USC Rossier Edventures Cohort 3. In July 2021, her venture was selected by the Amazon AWS Ed-stars accelerator program. At the end of November 2021, her A.I. Music startup was chosen by Newchip accelerator, ranked as the No.1 remote accelerator for scaling pre-seed startups to series A startups by Forbes magazine.

At the beginning of 2022, her startup was rewarded by the “Hello Alice” grant program among more than 400,000 applicants. By the middle of 2022, her venture officially partnered with the city of West Covina to be a part of the city’s youth development plan to benefit youth’s art education in the long run. At the end of September, her project entitled “A.I.-enabled Music Program” was rewarded by California Arts Council with grant programs entitled “Art Education Exposure” and “Creative Youth Development.”

As a pioneer educator, she created a novel educational program by developing state-of-the-art A.I. music technology with her innovatively designed curriculums, entitled “A.I.-enabled Music Program.” It utilizes the novelty of A.I. music generation tools and blends them with her signature curriculums to stimulate students’ creativity and improve their music learning outcomes by giving them the freshest and most unique music learning experiences. By the end of September 2022, her educational program, in alliance with West Covina City, was officially funded by California Art Council to fully implement the program in 2023-2024.”