Noa Hegesh (He Zhaoyin 何朝音) is a historian of sound, interested in musical thought and in sound as technology. Her research, focused on early and early medieval China, explores the ways elite society thought about sound and how they shaped and used tuning theories within
and outside of musical performances. Currently an assistant professor at the department of East Asian Studies at Tel Aviv University, Hegesh earned a doctorate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania. She conducted her postdoctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where she was part of Department III: Artefacts, Action, Knowledge and as part of the institute’s research group “Epistemes of Modern Acoustics".
Her recent publications include the article “Mind the Gap:Acoustical Answers to Cosmological Concerns in First-Century B.C.E. China” (Isis: A
Journal of the History of Science Society, 2021), a column titled “The Sound of Weights and Measures” (Nature Physics, 2020); Old Music, New Times:Zhangsun Shaoyuan and the Ritual Music of the Northern Zhou (Monumenta Serica, 2025)
