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 analysis of film music (with a particular focus on how people rely on music to perceive representations of gender, race, and ability), film music psychology (including perceptions of character identity and morality), topic theory, analogy, metaphor and music, cognition behind listening, modes of listening, schema theory, narrative and associations, and music theory pedagogy. In terms of repertoire, she focuses on postmillennial Hollywood film music (with current projects on music in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, among others) 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), Film Music Analysis: 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 was published in 2025 by Oxford University Press as part of the Oxford Studies in Music Theory series which won the 2026 Beethoven Research Award from the American Beethoven Society. It describes a cognitively-based framework for analyzing music from the perspective of different listeners (instead of relying on an "ideal" listener) and various modes of listening (including a cinematic mode of listening). One focus of the book is how people perceive musical topics and their associations differently depending on their experiences and mode of listening. She is currently working on a second book on analyzing topics, tropes, and texture in postmillennial Hollywood film music. 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