Senior Capstone Project WINS 2025 Audio Engineering Society Saul Walker Student Design Competition
&
Bronze in 2025 International Design Awards (IDA)
Judges include George Massenburg, inventor of Parametric Equalizer
First ever IDA award for University of Miami
INTROVERTIC
Directed by me•Written by me•Performed by me•Filmed by me•
Recorded by me•Edited by me•Original music by me
A one-man musical recorded in a singular room throughout the course of 5 months, exploring what it's like being an introvert, and the social challenges it brings.
"INTROVERTIC", the album, OUT NOW!
Featuring 17 songs from the film, all recorded, performed, mixed&mastered by me.
NEW SINGLE
The Worst Of You
About Me
Junyi (Joey) Zhu is currently a graduate student majoring in Music Engineering at the University of Miami. His current main focus is on loudspeaker and transducer design with extensive, practical experience in DSP tuning. His thesis aims to improve room acoustics simulation by optimizing the handoff criterion between beam tracing and ray tracing. With a passion for a wide array of subjects, Joey has accomplished multiple different personal projects outside of his coursework. In 2023, inspired by Bo Burnham's Inside, He spent a semester creating an hour-long musical, Introvertic, in his bedroom without assistance from anyone else while maintaining good grades in all of his classes. During this semester, where his average sleep was around 5 hours, he learned how to maximize the capabilities of a then-already-outdated Lumix GX85 camera which could only shoot 8-bit, compress mp4 format 4K footages in a dimly lit room. Joey also learned how to edit and colorgrade these footages in Davinci Resolve. You can find the film above.
While taking the Transducers' Theory class in his Junior year, Joey realized that, growing up, he had always enjoyed designing things. Therefore, for the final project for the class, he learned how to do CAD modeling and 3D printing in Fusion 360 outside of class, and created an active Push-Pull-Slot-Loading (PPSL) dual-5in subwoofer. The sub's performance was less than satisfactory due to some mathematical errors, but it no doubt paved the way for Joey's more ambitious projects down the line.
A year and a half later, Giulia was born. Again, a complete solo project. The development involved DSP, CAD modeling, 3D printing, Electrical Engineering, Embedded Software, and perhaps somewhat often forgotten, painting. The speaker featured a 3.5in center woofer coupled with a 3.5in down-firing passive radiator, dual 70° side firing 3in woofers with dual phased-aligned 3.4in tweeters. The speaker uses original DSP libraries in C++ along with custom tuning in Sigmastudio. It is capable of multi-room streaming, as well as Bluetooth, Optical and Coaxial inputs. During testing, the speaker was able to achieve relatively uniform magnitude response between +/- 90° off-axis measurements. Throughout 2025, it won 3rd place in the AES Student Design Competition, marking its ingenuity in engineering, as well as Bronze in the Consumer Electronics category in International Design Awards (IDA), marking a first-ever win for the University of Miami.
In Summer 2025, Joey worked as an Acoustics Engineering Intern at Bose. Given his knowledge in several different fields, Joey worked cross-functionally among several different teams such as research, acoustics, and product development. He helped oversee a research study for improving the voice pick-up system of a new headphone model, and dedicated much of his second half of the time there building and measuring a new Dolby Atmos listening room where all future Bose soundbars will be benchmarked against. Joey learned how to remote-access a Linux machine through MATLAB, set up the Atmos system in said room, and created automated scripts and functions to significantly reduce the measurement time.