ALUMNX STORY: JohnPaul Beattie (MC ’18), A Super Bowl Victory
“Music, composition, writing—it’s all storytelling.” -JohnPaul Beattie (MC ’18)
Two things have managed to stick with composer and VCFA Music Composition alumnx JohnPaul “JP” Beattie (MC ’18) for most of his life: music and football.
Today, Beattie is the Audio Engineer for the Philadelphia Eagles, the very football team that took home the Super Bowl title in 2025. But before working on the sound of the field, Beattie wanted to be the one making plays on the field.
“The fact that I’m doing my work for a football team makes everything feel extra special,” explains Beattie, “because I played football in middle school and high school—and I was all in. I mean, I thought back then, this is what I’m going to do.”
But after an injury on the field sidelined Beattie, a trip to the hospital revealed something worse than an injury Beattie could heal from: a set of fused vertebrae in his spine.
“It affects my life in zero. It’s totally benign in my everyday life,” insists Beattie. “However, if I kept playing football, it would have paralyzed me. And so… poof. Football could no longer exist in my life. And it was devastating. I mean, I think it was the first time I really experienced what depression was.”
While all of this was happening to Beattie, he received two gifts: a guitar and a song. Beattie had been given a guitar for his birthday and was simultaneously attending band lessons for the trumpet at school. After receiving news that his football career had ended on a Friday, that Monday in band practice his teacher just happened to play Samuel Barber’s emotionally stirring piece Adagio for Strings.
“This piece of music just took me to a whole other place,” recalls Beattie of that day. “That, coupled with getting the guitar, was my full circle moment… I was a football player and then I got that taken away, and then I found music, and now I’m doing music for my football team. It’s just really spiritual.”
Today as an Audio Engineer for the Philadelphia Eagles, Beattie has a hand in pretty much everything. “I do basically all of the content. So if you were to see something on YouTube or Instagram or wherever, I’d likely have a hand in whatever that thing is,” explains Beattie. “At the very minimum, I’m mixing all the videos, making sure that they all sound good. I’m potentially writing music, or I’m editing music… I am also recording everything that comes to the stadium. I record our radio announcers, the ref, the crowd….”
Not many NFL teams have an audio-only person working for their organization, but Beattie says the Eagles understand how important the auditory experience is to a game.
“We are a visual species, but our and our eyes confirm what our ears hear,” says Beattie. “The audio part is so incredibly important to the visceral experience of competition.
“If you were to close your eyes and picture what it’s like to go watch a game of any sport, some of the things you would probably describe are the sounds of the game: the whistles, the balls, the kicks, the crowds, the cheering, the doing. That’s all noise. That’s all sound. Recognizing all of that is really important—especially to the fan. We try to immerse our fans in the content. We want them to feel like they’re there, feel like, ‘Oh, I’m back at the stadium. I’m right there with you.’
“I think music, composition, writing—it’s all storytelling. And sports is just a natural story. When people say ‘I can’t get into sports’ … maybe you’re seeing an impersonal aspect of it. But if you really get into the human drama of what’s happening on the field and what it means in real time in front of you… that’s the fun part.”
And if you’re wondering, yes, Beattie was at the 2025 Super Bowl and watched his team take home the victory. He even has confetti from the field to prove it.
Looking back at his career thus far, Beattie sees his time studying at VCFA as a pivotal moment in the mix of many influential experiences. “VCFA was absolutely a turning point for me in my artistic life. At VCFA, the passion lit the candle,” says Beattie. “When you’re in it, you’re so immersed in all of the things, and once you’re out, you can look back and say, ‘Wow, this is really influential. I really wish I could just keep going.’”
Beattie credits his time in the VCFA MFA in Music Composition program—and his VCFA mentors John Mallia and Ravi Krishnaswami—for sharpening his understanding of maintaining the genuine intensity of a moment. In addition to his work as an Audio Engineer, Beattie works as a Sound Designer and Spatial Music Composer. As Spatial Music Composer, Beattie is working to redefine the physicality of sound and music. In his work, he inspects the cross-section between sound and space, and the way sound affects us given the physical space we inhabit. Physicality, and being in a stadium or a crowd, is one of the reasons Beattie believes audio is such a core component of sports.
“I think about how music exists in space, why it exists in space,” explains Beattie. “Music is a very physical thing to me, and I think about it as a physical medium. I think about what I will do with it and how it will affect other people.
“Emotions are very physical, if you think about it. At the end of the day, when you’re angry, your face crumples. When you’re sad, water starts coming out of your eyeballs. It’s a physical reaction.
“At a big concert, you hear that song, the bass, and then you walk out of that stadium with this euphoric feeling—you have all these endorphins going and it was so much fun. Well, what about it was fun? You could listen to that very band in your car. You can listen to it in your headphones. But when you’re watching a band with other people, hearing the crowd, it’s just louder in your skin. It’s in your bones.”
To Beattie, music exists in all corners of our lives, from concerts to the human music of a sports game. And if you’re still not convinced of the musicality of daily life, Beattie has one final parting rumination:
“Music is in all corners [of our lives], whether you acknowledge it or not. I think I saw somewhere once that if art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time. Time is finite. What you choose to listen to should be driven by your emotions. What do you need to feel?”