Daniel KL Chua is the Chair Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong. Before joining Hong Kong University as Head of the School of Humanities (2008-2014), he was a Fellow and the Director of Studies at St John's College, Cambridge, and later Professor of Music Theory and Analysis at King’s College London. He is the recipient of the 2004 Royal Musical Association's Dent Medal, a Fellow of the American Musicological Society, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He served as the President of the International Musicological Society 2017-2022.

He has written widely on music, but is particularly known for his work on Beethoven, the history of absolute music, and the intersection between music, philosophy, technology and theology. His books include The 'Galitzin' Quartets of Beethoven (Princeton, 1994), Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, 1999), Beethoven and Freedom (Oxford, 2017), Alien Listening: Voyager's Golden Record and Music From Earth (Zone Books, 2021), and Music and Joy: Lessons on the Good Life (Yale, 2024).