Nikita Braguinski

Dr. Nikita Braguinski is a musicologist and media theorist with a special interest in how technology plays a role in the creation, distribution, and the study of music. Having worked on music technologies from the 19th century to now, he currently concentrates on how novel data collections and AI techniques might impact musical thinking and the disciplinary boundaries of musicology. He holds a Master’s degree in Musicology from the University of Cologne (Germany) and a PhD in Media Theory from Humboldt University of Berlin, where his dissertation focused on musical algorithms. His second book after his published PhD thesis, the introductory volume Mathematical Music. From Antiquity to Music AI (Routledge, 2022) was translated into Korean and won a Korean book prize. In 2023, he was a co-convener of an interdisciplinary research group on the future of AI in musicology at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Bielefeld. Most recently, he was a fellow at RWTH Aachen University’s Käte Hamburger Kolleg, where he was researching musical AI and data. In 2019-20, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Music Department at Harvard University, where he studied the composer and theorist Joseph Schillinger. He has since been a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow at both Humboldt University of Berlin and Amsterdam University. Dr. Braguinski’s research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals such as American Music and 19th-Century Music, and he has received funding from a number of institutions including the German DAAD agency and the Volkswagen Foundation.

Photograph by Oxana Guryanova