Julianne Grasso

Julianne Grasso specializes in theoretical and analytical approaches to music in multimedia, especially video games. Her most recent published work has appeared in The Journal of Sound and Music in Games and The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory with a forthcoming essay in The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound (eds. Gibbons and Grimshaw-Aagaard). She has presented at the annual meetings of the Society for Music Theory, the American Musicological Society, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and many other conferences and conventions regional to international. She has served on Society for Music Theory’s Committee on Race and Ethnicity, was chair of the Film and Multimedia Interest Group, and currently serves on the steering committee for the North American Conference on Video Game Music.

She completed her undergraduate degree at Princeton University, then earned the Ph.D. in Music History and Theory in 2020 from the University of Chicago with a dissertation entitled “Video Game Music, Meaning, and the Possibilities of Play,” a project that was supported by a fellowship from the Franke Institute for the Humanities. From 2020 to 2022, she was the Grace Hill Milam Centennial Fellow in the Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. At the University of Chicago and UT Austin, she taught courses in tonal harmony and form, post-tonal theory, writing skills, and media studies. Her other interests include public music theory, music cognition, and pedagogy. Combining these areas of interest, she streams regularly with colleagues on Twitch, chatting about music, games, and academia at twitch.tv/bardicknowledge.