Liam Hynes-Tawa is a music theorist who specializes in Renaissance and baroque modality and tonality, and in Japanese music and music theory of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These apparently dissimilar research areas are tied together by both involving contradictory pitch systems encountering each other and trying to make sense of each other. Other interests include classical form, video game music, harmony and schemata in enka and J-pop, the history of music notations, and the history of music theories.

I studied Music and East Asian Studies at Brown University, graduating in 2012 and beginning a PhD in Music Theory at Yale University the following year, not expecting at first how much my two undergraduate majors would end up blending further down the line. I finished the PhD in spring 2020, completing the program virtually amid the chaos of the early covid period, and spent the next two years continuing to teach at Yale before coming to Wesleyan in the fall of 2022.