Kristina Knowles

Kristina Knowles is an assistant professor of music theory at Arizona State University's Herberger Institute School of Music. Her specialties are rhythm and meter, music perception and cognition, music theory pedagogy, music and time, and 20th c. music. An interdisciplinary scholar, her dissertation combined research in music theory, philosophy, and psychology to argue for an in-time and processive approach to the study of rhythm and meter in contemporary compositions that are predominantly unmetered, with a focus on the perceptual effect these musical structures may have on the subjective experience of time while listening.

Knowles has presented at numerous regional, national, and international conferences in the fields of music theory and music cognition, including the European Music and Analysis Conference (2014), the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (2015), the Society of Music Theory (2015), and the International Conference on Making Time in Music (2016). She is currently working on a larger project exploring the relationship between time and music, and has various publications in progress on the related topics of music and memory, time perception in contemporary music, and post-pastoralism in the works of George Crumb. 

Professor Knowles received her master's and doctorate in music theory and cognition from Northwestern University, and received a bachelor's in music theory at Nazareth College, where she studied music theory, composition, voice, and piano. Knowles currenty teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in music theory and cognition.