Evan is a second-year masters student at McGill University in Montreal. He received his bachelors degree from Penn State in Computer Science with minors in Music Technology and Arts Entrepreneurship. During his undergraduate studies, he played trombone for five seasons with the Penn State Marching Blue Band, co-founded the university’s first arts entrepreneurship organization, worked as a resident assistant for three years, and researched the musical perception of concert halls with the Graduate Program in Acoustics.

For his masters thesis, Evan is researching the application of generative adversarial networks to create synthetic 12th-century chant manuscripts from scratch, and see whether novel and existing automatic transcription operations will yield higher accuracy when trained on extensible fake data instead of finite real data. As more real manuscript data is gathered, Evan will also consider how the fake data will generalize to previously ‘unseen’ handwriting styles, backgrounds, and non-musical information.

High-stepping away from the football field and onto the dance floor, Evan is now an avid music producer and DJ under the alias S4V4GE, mainly focusing on techno, trance, and ambient textures in his compositions and performances.