Rebecca Abraham (Beccy) is an MFA student in the Sonic Practice program at Dartmouth College. They graduated from UC Berkeley in 2020 with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. They were a research fellow at the Berkeley Center for New Media, where they started working on the Magical Musical Mat with Professor Rachel Chen. While at Berkeley, Rebecca cofounded GIA MAG, a new community arts publication by and for queer/trans people of color. 
At Dartmouth, Rebecca researches musical surrogate languages with Professors Laura McPherson and Andrew McPherson (Imperial College). Rebecca’s research interests also include collaborative instrument design, and they were a finalist for the Processing Foundation Fellowship in 2024 for their work creating Tiny Touch Instruments. Rebecca has presented work at Sensing the Forest, through the Center for Digital Music at Queen Mary University; the Open Source Arts Contributors’ Conference; and NIME. At NIME in 2024, they won “Best Music / Art Installation Award” for their piece, A Thousand Mornings, with support from the Arts Integration Grant at Dartmouth. Most recently, they presented their work with Tiny Touch Instruments at the Sound / Image Festival, hosted by the University of Greenwich. 
Rebecca's primary instrument is the marimba, and they have more than a decade of concert percussion experience. They've played trombone with Cal Band and acted as principal percussionist for the University Wind Ensemble at UC Berkeley. They currently play with the Dartmouth College Wind Ensemble. In 2024, they won first place (brass and percussion division) in the Culley Concerto Competition.
Publication
Rebecca Abraham, and Albert Zhang. 2024. Choreographing Sound: Co-creating Music and Movement through touch with the Magical Musical Mat. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression.
Awards / Engagements​​​​​​​
• Tiny Touch Instruments workshop at the Sound / Image Festival, Fall 2024
• Leslie Center for the Humanities Fellowship ($1000), Summer 2024
• 1st place (brass and percussion), Culley Concerto Competition, 2024
• Arts Integration Grant, Hopkins Center for the Arts ($10,000), 2023-2024
• 1st place, best use of Google Cloud, HackDavis 2020