Music researchers have barely attended to music’s intimate kinship with love, nor have modern-day theorists of love, from Badiou to Byung-Chul Han, Kristeva to Sedgwick, dealt with music, either as love-object or expressive, social, or political medium, notwithstanding gestures by Barthes and Dolar. The love/music nexus thus remains unmarked, naturalized, and radically underthought. Yet its entanglements across places, topoi, and genres, and in sounds of loss and longing, romantic or religious, popular and “high-brow,” provide unique insight into numerous questions, social, psychic, aesthetic, and political. Our project will bring the love-music kinship out of the shadows, giving a robust formation to thinking about why and how love and music are entwined in countless times and places. By assembling scholars and artists, primarily from Europe, North America, north Africa, and the Middle East, in workshops and public events, we plan to turn the love/music relation into a conscious intellectual object of attention. Ideally the IIRP will launch the project with two (of four) semi-public workshops during 2025-27 as we establish an ongoing global network of thinkers. Products coincident with IIRP funding will include a dynamic open website and mixed-media journal issue. A capstone conference (2027-28) and ambitious edited volume will follow.