Tiffany Ta

Bio

Tiffany Ta (she/her) is a PhD student in music theory at UC Santa Barbara with an emphasis in cognitive science. Her interdisciplinary work explores how resonance—how sound, identity, and memory move across bodies, cultures, and institutions—operates at the intersection of music, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and critical theory. She is particularly interested in musical semiotics, the sonic dimensions of cultural memory, and the intersections of music with disability and feminist studies.

Tiffany developed her love for music by playing piano duets with her five sisters, eventually earning a BM in piano performance from CSU Long Beach. While completing an MM in music theory at the University of Kansas, she co-founded the Asian Classical Music Initiative, an organization dedicated to the promotion of Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander music. At UCSB, she is the recipient of the Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship and has twice won the Grad Slam preliminary round for the Humanities and Fine Arts—most recently earning the People’s Choice Award at the 2025 campus-wide final. In 2024, she received Honorable Mention for the GSA Excellence in Teaching Award.

Her current projects include an invited chapter for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Global Music Industry Studies, where she examines how K-pop resonates with the legacies of hip-hop’s Black American lineage—sonic, aesthetic, and political. She has presented research at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, Music and the Moving Image, the West Coast Conference of Music Theory and Analysis, and Music Theory Southeast. In 2025, she will present at the Society for Music Theory’s national meeting and recently shared her work at the K-popology conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

Tiffany currently serves as graduate student representative for the Pacific Southwest chapter of the American Musicological Society, committee member for Project Spectrum, and co-organizer of the SMT Rap & Hip-Hop Interest Group. At UCSB, she represents the music department in the Graduate Student Association.

As a teacher and researcher, Tiffany builds quiet infrastructures that support learning, deepen access, and make space for offbeat rhythms and delayed resolutions. She lives between two frequencies: Kim Kardashian’s “I didn’t get this far just to get this far,” and Buckminster Fuller’s call to “build a new model that’s so effective, it renders the old one obsolete.”