Sean Atkinson

Sean Atkinson is the Director of the School of Music and an Associate Professor of Music Theory at TCU, teaching a wide range of music courses including first- and second-year music theory and aural skills, form and analysis, and graduate seminars on music analysis, musical meaning, and popular music. He has earned both MM and PhD degrees in music theory from Florida State University and holds a BM degree in music theory and trombone performance from Furman University.

Atkinson is the author of a course for The Great Courses called Music Theory: The Foundation of Great Music. The course teaches viewers the basics of Western music theory, from note and rhythm reading, all the way through harmony, harmonic progressions, and reading lead sheets. Additionally, his research, which broadly address issues of musical meaning in multimedia contexts, has been published in numerous journals, including Music Theory Online, Indiana Theory Review, The Dutch Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory and Analysis, and Popular Music. He is also active in the growing field of video game music (ludomusicology), with presentations at the North American Conference on Video Game Music and Music and the Moving Image, and several forthcoming essays in edited collections on video game music. In 2018, Atkinson joined with a group of faculty from across campus to create No Quarters, an on-campus video game lab committed to the interdisciplinary research and teaching of video games. Housed in the TCU library, the lab allows students and teachers to explore a growing number of games and consoles, including virtual reality.

Atkinson is also an active member of the faculty at TCU, having recently served as chair of the Faculty Senate where he has been a member since 2016.