Janet Bourne

Janet Bourne is interested in who is listening and, from a cognitive perspective, why listeners find certain interpretations of music intuitive. Her research interests include analogy, metaphor and music, cognition behind listening, modes of listening, topic theory, schema theory, narrative and associations, music theory pedagogy, and representations of gender, race, and ability in film music. In terms of repertoire, she focuses on postmillennial Hollywood film music and Austro-Germanic music of the long eighteenth-century. Combining traditional music-theoretic tools with concepts and methodologies from cognitive science, she runs (and founded) the UCSB Music Cognition Lab. She has publications in Music Theory Online, Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening (winner of 2023 publication award from SMT’s Film and Multimedia Interest Group), Music Analysis, and Film: Studying the Score, Norton Guide to Teaching Music Theory, Frontiers in Neuroscience, Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy, among others. She has presented her research at regional, national, and international conferences, including the Society for Music Theory and the Society for Music Perception and Cognition. Her book Who Listens? Experience, Cognition, and Musical Meaning is forthcoming from Oxford University Press as part of the Oxford Studies in Music Theory series. It describes a cognitively-based framework for analyzing music from the perspective of different listeners and various modes of listening. Dr. Bourne received a PhD in music theory and cognition from Northwestern University, and won the Dorothy Payne award for best student paper from the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic as a graduate student. Before arriving at U.C. Santa Barbara, she was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Bates College.

UCSB Music Cognition Lab: ucsbmusiccognitionlab.weebly.com