Veronika Muchitsch

Short presentation

My work investigates figurations of music, meaning, materiality, and subjectivity at the intersections of humans and technology in postdigital music cultures. Recent publications address, among other things, experimental musicians’ music platform imaginaries and musical figurations of 'sad girls' in TikTok’s affective publics.

I am the principal investigator of a Swedish Research Council–funded research project (2025–2028) examining formations of mental health and gender in online music culture.

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 and Swedish representative, 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 primarily draw on feminist theory across perspectives including critical new materialism, affect theory, and sound studies, alongside cultural and critical theory more broadly. 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.

I further participate in an ongoing research project on organisational and social work environments in artistic professions.

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. The project resulted in articles published in New Media & Society, Popular Music and Society, Twentieth-Century Music och IASPM Journal and discuss the mediatization of music and listening in Spotify's annual marketing campaign Wrapped, "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.