Natalie P. Miller
Office: TC 418
Email: nmille68@uwo.ca
Natalie P. Miller is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Don Wright Faculty of Music at Western University.
As a music theorist committed to interdisciplinary inquiry, her work examines how the 21st century’s state of constant technological mediation shapes musical attention and immersion. Combining theoretical inquiry and behavioral empirical methodologies, her work fosters dialogue between music theory, music cognition, and media studies to shed light on music’s role in shaping experience across media platforms and audiovisual contexts like TikTok, live multimedia concerts, video games, and television. Ultimately, her research bridges the gap between traditional music theoretical frameworks and the varied ways listeners engage with music, advancing an approach to music theory that better reflects how listener attention varies within and across multimedia contexts.
Her current projects collectively investigate how audiovisual contexts, musical content, and individual differences interact to shape meaning-making and immersive experiences across media environments. For example, her work on TikTok assesses how varied degrees of musical repetition and audiovisual congruence shape immersive experiences in short-form content consumption. Her research on live video game music concerts includes leading collaborations with global concert production teams, analyzing how processes of musical rearrangement, changing audiovisual contexts, and technological remediation reshape musical experiences, engendering diverse thought patterns and degrees of immersion. In her research on music from reality television, Miller draws on theoretical and corpus methods to investigate how musical scoring practices in reality television guide attention and shape viewers’ sense of ‘reality.’ Each of these projects considers how music guides, captures, and shapes attention, drawing on diverse methods to center musical attention as a core analytic priority within music theory.
In addition to her research, Miller supports interdisciplinary networks of knowledge exchange in her scholarly communities through her teaching and service endeavors. She has previously taught courses on music theory, music cognition, and music and language at Princeton University and Rowan College of South Jersey. While at Princeton University, she founded and led the Music Mentoring Program, which secured grant funding to connect undergraduate mentees with graduate mentors, host community-building events, and foster a sense of belonging throughout the department. She has previously held the positions of Trainee Representative for the Society for Music Perception and Cognition and Student Needs Assessment group leader for the Society for Music Theory.
Before coming to Western, she earned her PhD in Musicology from Princeton University in 2025. She also holds a MA from Princeton University, as well as BA in Music and a BA in Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin.
