Associate Professor of Music Theory Janet Bourne Awarded Tenure & Publishes New Book On Music and Cognition

The UC Santa Barbara Department of Music is proud to announce that Associate Professor of Music Theory Janet Bourne has been awarded tenure. A trailblazer at the intersection of music theory and cognitive science, Dr. Bourne also celebrates the July publication of her new book, Who Listens? Experience, Cognition, and Musical Meaning, with Oxford University Press.

The book explores a cognitively grounded framework for analyzing music through the lens of diverse listener experiences and modes of listening. This work builds on Dr. Bourne's broad research interests, which 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. Her scholarship draws from postmillennial Hollywood film scores to eighteenth-century Austro-Germanic repertoire.

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.

At UCSB, Janet Bourne founded and directs the Music Cognition Lab, where she combines traditional analytical tools with methodologies from cognitive science. Her research has appeared in leading journals and edited volumes, including Music Theory Online, Frontiers in Neuroscience, Music Analysis, and the award-winning Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening.

Congratulations to Janet Bourne on this milestone achievement and her continued contributions to the field of music theory and cognition.

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