Maurice Windleburn received his PhD in Musicology from the University of Melbourne and is a fellow of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. His current research examines how philosophers, occultists, scientists, and critics in modernist France (1880-1940) developed cosmological worldviews that privileged sound, music, or vibration, along with the effects that these theories had on music and other artforms in the same period. In exploring past worldviews that metaphysically privilege sound (or adjacent concepts like music, rhythm, resonance, and vibration), Windleburn will provide a richer historical context for the ‘sonic ontologies’ currently circulating in sound studies and continental philosophy.

More broadly, Windleburn’s work examines relations between sound, aesthetics, and cosmology. He is co-editor for a volume tentatively titled Music and Sound in Negative Aesthetics and Metaphysics, and is undertaking a second research project examining philosophical conceptions of resonance in Chinese thought, comparing and differentiating Chinese thinking on resonance with similar conceptions found in continental philosophy.

In addition to his present focus, Windleburn retains a research interest in contemporary avant-garde music, having published his first book, John Zorn’s File Card Works: Hypertextual Intermediality in Composition and Analysis, with Routledge. He has written on the music of Luc Ferrari, Noah Chreshevsky, and Otomo Yoshihide, publishing in several musicological and interdisciplinary journals, including Tempo and Organised Sound, and has contributed chapters to edited volumes on music and new media, and on music philosophy. He is the inaugural chair of the Musicological Society of Australia’s Philosophy of Sound and Music study group, and a reviews editor for Musicology Australia.