Tan, Daphne

Daphne Tan

Daphne Tan is Associate Professor of Music Theory. Her research explores questions about music and the mind, with methodologies and perspectives from the history of music theory and cognitive science. She has published articles on the theories of Ernst Kurth in Music Theory Spectrum (2020; recipient of the 2021 Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory), the Journal of Music Theory (2017; awarded the David Kraehenbuehl Prize), and Theoria (2015), and she is editor and co-translator (with Christoph Neidhöfer) of the first English-language translation of Kurth’s Music Psychology (Routledge 2022). More recently, she has examined the interplay of music analysis, pedagogy, and esoteric practice in the writings of Victor Zuckerkandl, with chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory (Oxford 2022) and Explorations in Music and Esotericism (Rochester 2023). With collaborators, Tan has also conducted empirical studies related to harmonic function, emotion and music, expressive performance, diatonic modes, and musical form. This work can be read in Empirical Musicology Review (2023 [2021]), Music Perception (2021, 2017, 2013), Musicae Scientiae (2021), Psychology of Music (2020), and the Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies (2009). Tan’s research has been supported by the University of Toronto Connaught Fund and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). In 2023, she received an Early Career Supervision Award from the University of Toronto’s School of Graduate Studies.