Veronika Muchitsch

Short presentation

My research is situated at the crossing of feminist theory, musicology, and sound studies and examines the mediation of music, meaning, and subjectivity in the technologically mediated music cultures of the 21st century.

I have recently written about Anohni's transfeminine voice, "genrefluid" Spotify playlists, and TikTok's affective music cultures.

I am currently leading a three-year research project on young people's mediations of mental health and gender through TikTok's online music cultur

Keywords

• musicology
• voice
• gender
• feminist theory
• popular music
• sound studies
• critical new materialism
• digital media
• algorithmic technologies

Biography

Researcher in Musicology, Uppsala University (since 2025)

Board member, IASPM-Norden (since 2025)

Lecturer in Gender Studies, Södertörn University (2024-2025)

Postdoctoral researcher in Gender Studies and Musicology at Södertörn University and University of Oslo (2021-2024)

PhD in Musicology, Uppsala University (2020)

MA in Musicology, University of Graz, Austria (2015)

Research

In my research, I am primarily drawing on feminist theorisation in critical new materialism, poststructuralism, and science and technology studies as well as feminst sound studies and theorizations of sonic materiality. I combine methodological tools from musicology and popular music, media, and gender studies.

My current research funded by the Swedish Research Council (2025-2028) examines the mediation of mental health in music-technological practices through a study of girls’ online music cultures on TikTok. The project studies young people’s experiences of their technologically and musically mediated mental health practices online and seeks to theorise how these practices are shaped by the roles of and relationships between human, sonic, and sociotechnical processes on algorithmic music and media platforms.

In my postdoctoral research at Södertörn University and the University of Oslo (Swedish Research Council, 2021-2024), I studied how music and subjectivities are mediated in algorithmic music cultures. In resulting publications, I discuss "genrefluid" Spotify playlists, constructions of genre and identity, and TikTok's affective music cultures.

In my doctoral thesis, Vocal Figurations (2020), I theorized how voices in 21st century pop music are gendered through multiply mediated processes of singing and listening. An article that develops a thesis chapter, in which I study transfeminine voice in contemporary popular music through a study of singer and songwriter Anohni was awarded the IASPM Norden Early Career Scholar Award 2024.