Karen Cook

Education

PhD, Musicology; Certificate in Medieval & Renaissance Studies, Duke University

MM, Music Theory Pedagogy; Musicology, Peabody Conservatory

BA, Music Performance; Religion, Gettysburg College

Karen M. Cook specializes in the music, theory, and notation of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and also in medievalism in contemporary music & media, especially video games, which is her secondary main area of research.

She has presented her work at numerous national and international conferences, including the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory, the annual Medieval-Renaissance music conference, the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, the 2015 conference on Philippe de Vitry, and the North American Conference on Video Game Music, for which she sits on the planning committee.

She is on the advisory board for the “Ars Antiqua Online: A Digital Edition of Thirteenth-Century Polyphony” and an executive committee member of the Society for the Study of Sound and Music in Games, and she recently became Associate Editor for the Journal of Sound and Music in Games. She also regularly streams with the “Ludomusicology Stream Team” on Thursday nights on Twitch.

In addition, she is a singer and performer of both early and contemporary music, and is routinely on the faculty and staff of Amherst Early Music, the largest presenter of early music workshops in North America.

Recently published and forthcoming works include

Karen M. Cook, William Gibbons, and Fanny Rebillard, eds. Global Histories of Video Game Music Technology. Requested for Music, Science & Technology series, Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini, Brepols, 2025.

Michael Austin, Karen M. Cook, and Dana Plank, eds. Gender, Sexuality, and Video Game Sound. Under contract with Routledge. Anticipated publication 2026-27.

Karen M. Cook, ed. Out of the Cloister: Lone Medievalists Making the Middle Ages Matter. Under contract with Palgrave. Forthcoming 2027.

Karen M. Cook and Dana Plank. “Music and Emotions in Video Games.” Requested for The Oxford Handbook of Music and Emotions, edited by Patrik Juslin, Oxford University Press. Forthcoming 2027.

Karen M. Cook, Gillian Gower, Brandi Neal, and Matthew Ovalle. “Black Composers in the Squarcialupi Codex: Race, Portraiture, and Music in Late Medieval Italy.” Requested for Crossroads of Difference: Race and the Making of Premodern Italy, edited by Laura Ingallinella and Robert Clines, ACMRS Press. Forthcoming 2027.

“Musical Representations of Tudor England in Video Games.” In Music, Sound, and Identity in Video Games, edited by Lidia Lópes Gómez, 33-56. Palgrave Games in Context. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2025.

“Medieval Sonic Environments in Video Games.” In Music and Sonic Environments in Video Games: Listening to and Performing Ludic Soundscapes, edited by Kate Galloway and Elizabeth Hambleton. New York: Routledge, 2024.

“Hearing the Renaissance in Video Games.” In The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound, edited by William Gibbons and Mark Grimshaw, 537-555. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.

“8-Bit Affordances: Jun Chikuma’s Soundtrack for Faxanadu (1987).” Music Theory Online 29 no. 3 (2023). https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.23.29.3/mto.23.29.3.cook.html

“Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Finding (and Losing) Johannes de Bosco.” Acta Musicologica 94, no. 2 (Dec 2022): 136–155.

Music Theory in Late Medieval Avignon: Magister Johannes Pipardi. RMA Monographs 37. New York: Routledge, 2021.