Brian Kane is Professor of Music and Film and Media Studies at Yale University. For many years, he was active as a guitarist in the San Francisco Bay Area’s jazz and avant-garde music scenes. As a jazz guitarist, he recorded with Frank Jackson, Jason Myers, and the Blue Room Boys, among others. He also toured with singer-songwriter Victoria Williams and arranged and co-produced the albums Water to Drink and Sings Some Ol’ Songs. Kane was deeply involved in the Bay Area improvised music scene in the early 2000s and received his PhD in music composition from UC Berkeley in 2006. As a composer, he has written numerous works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, vocalists, solo instruments, electronic music, and sound installations. His compositions have been performed in the U.S. and abroad by the Berkeley Symphony, Wet Ink, pianist Sebastian Berweck, Trio 3D, and others.
Before joining the Yale faculty in 2008, Kane was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at Columbia University and worked as a “new music” DJ at the legendary radio station WKCR.
Kane’s scholarly research spans jazz, music theory, philosophy, and contemporary music, with a particular focus on sound, signification, the senses, phenomenology, and critical theory. He is the author of two books published by Oxford University Press: Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (2014) and Hearing Double: Jazz, Ontology, Auditory Culture (2024). His writing has appeared in qui parle, Current Musicology, Contemporary Music Review, Journal of Visual Culture, Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Sound Studies, Kalfou, and various sound art catalogs.
