Wallmark, Zachary

Zachary Wallmark

Zachary Wallmark is a musicologist with an interest in popular music, timbre, and music cognition. Prior to his appointment at UO, Wallmark served on the music faculty at Southern Methodist University, where he also held a courtesy appointment in psychology. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on American popular music history and analysis, music and emotion, film music, hip-hop, timbre, music and politics, and opera, among other topics.

Working at the intersection of the cognitive sciences and musicology, Wallmark’s research seeks to account for the role of musical timbre (tone) in emotional response, aesthetic judgment, and music sociology, particularly in the context of post-1945 American popular music. His book Nothing but Noise: Timbre and Musical Meaning at the Edge (Oxford, 2022) explores the slippery psychoacoustic and social fault lines separating perceptions of musical timbre from “noise,” with reception case studies drawn from free jazz, extreme heavy metal, and traditional Japanese music. Wallmark’s work has been published in both musicological and scientific journals, including Emotion, Ethnomusicology Review, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music Perception, Music & Science, Music Theory Online, Psychology of Music, and Psychomusicology. He is also coeditor (with Robert Fink and Melinda Latour) of the award-winning volume, The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music (Oxford, 2018).