Karl Kügle studied piano at the Hochschule für Musik, Munich (1975-81), the Hochschule für Musik Würzburg (1981-82) and the Juilliard School (1982-83), as well as musicology, theatre studies and Japanese at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich (1976-82). He continued his studies at New York University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1993 with a study of the fourteenth-century manuscript Ivrea, Biblioteca capitolare 115 and its music. He subsequently held research positions at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. In 1998, he joined the Department of Music at the University of Hong Kong where he taught until 2004. In autumn 2004, he was appointed Professor of Musicology at Utrecht University where he occupied the Chair in the History of Music prior to 1800 until becoming Professor emeritus in 2023. Since 2016, he holds a contiguous appointment in the University of Oxford, where he was Senior Researcher in the Faculty of Music, and Principal Investigator of the MALMECC project (www.music.malmecc.ox.ac.uk) from 2016 to 2022. He has been a Senior Research Fellow of Wadham College from 2016 and currently serves as Director of Research in the Faculty of Music at Oxford. His most recent research project, funded by an ERC Proof-of-Concept grant, has taken him to KU Leuven where he is Principal Investigator of the VALSOUNDS project (www.valsounds.eu, 2023-2025) and a visiting professor in the Department of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering.

Prior to his KU Leuven visiting appointment, Kügle held visiting professorships at the Universities of Chicago (2002), Melbourne (2003), Cambridge (2013), and Heidelberg (2022-23), and was Christensen Visiting Fellow at St Catherine's College, University of Oxford (Trinity term 2014) as well as Senior Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS, 2014-15). He was Project Leader of the HERA-financed international research project Sound Memories (soundme.eu) as well as Principal Investigator of the Dutch team at UU (2016-19). In early 2019, he was in residence as a Senior Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz and as a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Kügle served as Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong (2004-2010), Head of the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University (2011-2013), and President of the Royal Society for Music History of The Netherlands (KVNM), the oldest musicological society in the world (2009-2014). A Fellow of the Academia Europaea (2012), Kügle's research interests are focused on the history of European music during the later Middle Ages (ca. 1250-1450), late medieval and early modern court cultures in a transdisciplinary context, and the epistemology of sound, hearing, and music during the later Middle Ages and from ca. 1800 to the present.