The Department of Music
In the Department of Music, music historians, music theorists, and ethnomusicologists work and research hand in hand with psychologists, sociologists, and neuroscientists in order to jointly develop a transdisciplinary aesthetics of music in which all relevant approaches and methods are productively intertwined. The intention is to gain a better understanding of the specific field of experience and practice that humans have created for themselves with music and how they make use of it.
Our research questions address key topics in philosophical aesthetics like taste, judgment, and particularly, aesthetic experience. We investigate these by orienting ourselves with a conceptual framework that considers the aesthetic experience of music to be the result of the coincidence in time and space of three meta-factors: a person, a sequence of sounds, and a situational and discursive frame (“frame” in the sense of Erving Goffman). Each of these has specific characteristics and manifestations that, in interplay with each other, give rise to a specific aesthetic experience.
We examine the aesthetic experience of music...
...and its factors using a full range of empirical methods: we gather self-reported information in the form of qualitative interviews and questionnaires with open-ended and closed-ended questions, we observe and analyze behavior—again, qualitatively and quantitatively, and we measure the physiological and neural correlates of listening to music.
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The reception situations we examine include not only experiments in typical laboratory settings, but also semi-realistic settings in our ArtLab as well as real everyday experiences. All types of music and all ways of handling music (“musicking,” to use Christopher Small’s term) hold interest for us. It is particularly important to us to expand empirical music aesthetics to explore repertoires, practices, and discourses of non-Western cultures. Therefore, we also work comparatively across cultures and conduct studies in other countries and continents. Here, as well as in our research on the aesthetic experience in realistic live contexts (such as at a concert or a religious service), our pursuit of specific research questions is always linked with development of methods.
Intentionally, we conduct not only empirical, but also historical and theoretical research; after all, music, musicking practices, and related norms are first of all socioculturally determined and historically mutable phenomena.
Research Areas
Aesthetic experience of music: dimensions, qualities and measurements
Whether the aesthetic experience of music can be meaningfully measured at all—and if so, how—and what type of knowledge is gained through such measurements, is perhaps the most controversial question in empirical aesthetics. It seems that an almost insurmountable gap arises between philosophical concepts and literary or autobiographical descriptions of aesthetic experiences on the one hand and typical empirical measurements on the other.
Aesthetic experience of music in live and medial contexts
While existing research, particularly in music psychology, has primarily investigated the combined effect of the individual’s and the stimulus features to better understand evaluative, emotional, or behavioral responses to music, we are also investigating the influences of frames.
Long-term editorial projects
Empirical studies on cultural artifacts and practices like music can profit enormeously from a sound historical knowledge on music, its practices, aesthetics and discourses. Therefore, we not only deal with relevant historical aspects in a number of single studies, but have also started two series of long-term projects.
Aesthetic experience of music: influencing factors on individual and group level
The observation that one and the same aesthetic object is valued differently by different people was already made and discussed in antiquity, as well as the observation that people differ in regard to their more or less stable preferences for or aversions to aesthetic objects and object classes.
Musical development in children
How do children learn to sing melodies and produce rhythms? How do they develop musical taste? How do they learn to understand and use music in various situations? Can we boost spontaneous, implicit musical learning with educational interventions?
Latest Publications
Wald-Fuhrmann, M., Herget, A.-K., Kreutzer, M., & Egermann, H. (2026). Concert
formats influence how audiences experience live classical music. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
doi:10.1057/s41599-025-06461-9.
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Degé, F., Frischen, U., & Schwarzer, G. (2026). Music and Cognitive Development.
In G. Kreutz, & G. Bernatzky (
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Pearson, L., Nuttall, T., & Pouw, W. (2025). The Co-Structuring of Gesture-Vocal
Dynamics: An Exploration in Karnatak Music Performance. Cognitive Science,49(11):
e70137. doi:10.1111/cogs.70137.
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Bruder, C., Breda, P., & Larrouy-Maestri, P. (2025). Attractive synthetic voices. Computers in Human Behavior,6: 100211. doi:10.1016/j.chbah.2025.100211.
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Vaquero, L., Groves, K., Muñoz-Vida, E. L., James, K., Marlor, J. L., McIntyre, C., Ostiai, L., Sirota, S., Shields, L., Degé,
F., García-Mingo, E., & Ripollés, P. (2025). Studying the effects of digital arts-based
interventions on teenagers’ social media usage, brain connectivity, and mental health: Study protocol of the SMART project. European Journal of Psychotraumatology,16(1): 2550079. doi:10.1080/20008066.2025.2550079.
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Fink, L. T., & Lange, E. B. (2025). Beginning, middle, end: Perception of temporal
functions in sonata form. Music Perception. doi:10.1525/mp.2025.2327163.
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Knoop, C. A., & Blohm, S. (2025). Literarinesses — A bag of three-sided coins. Literature,5(3): 21. doi:10.3390/literature5030021.
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Gernandt, E., Lange, E. B., & Merrill, J. (2025). What elevates music to a ‘favorite’?
On the aesthetics of music from the perspective of musical taste. Empirical Studies of the Arts.
doi:10.1177/02762374251365160.
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Rai, L. A., Lee, H., Becke, E., Trenado, C., Abad-Hernando, S., Sperling, M., Vidaurre, D., Wald-Fuhrmann, M., Richardson,
D. C., Ward, J. A., & Orgs, G. (2025). Delta-band audience brain synchrony tracks
engagement with live and recorded dance. iScience,28(7):
112922. doi:10.1016/j.isci.2025.112922.
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Lange, E. B., Gernandt, E., & Merrill, J. (2025). Categorizing music by genres. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. doi:10.1111/nyas.15404.
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Director
Assistants
Researchers
- Ackermann, Taren
- Aydin, Talip Ata
- Bär, Christian
- Boenneke, Sven
- Buettner, Anna
- Cohen, David
- Czepiel, Anna
- Degé, Franziska
- Durojaye, Cecilia
- Elvers, Paul
- Fink, Lea
- Fink, Lauren
- Fischinger, Timo
- Gernandt, Emily
- Gleiß, Diana
- González Sánchez, Andrea
- Greb, Fabian
- Green, Owen
- Grimm, Hartmut †
- Grüny, Christian
- Heimann, Katrin
- Henschke, Sebastian †
- Kaufmann, Michaela
- Kehrer, Philipp
- Knoop, Christine A.
- Kudakov, Nikita
- Lange, Elke B.
- Larrouy-Maestri, Pauline
- Mencke, Iris
- Merrill, Julia
- Modestini, Pietro
- Omigie, Diana
- Orgs, Guido
- Pearson, Lara
- Polak, Rainer
- Rahman, Mohammad Adika
- Roeske, Tina
- Ruccius, Alexis
- Saxena, Shreshth
- Schaaf, Katharina
- Seibert, Christoph
- Siebrasse, Anne
- Taylor, Sofia
- Toelle, Jutta
- van Dyck-Hemming, Annette
- Vignali, Federica
- Vroegh, Thijs
- Wald-Fuhrmann, Melanie
- Wester, Janniek
- Wiesecke, Janine
- Will, Johanna
- Wörner, Felix
- Zschauer, Anna
Academic Degrees
2025
Anne Siebrasse
Musikgeschmack und Musikpräferenzen: Ausdifferenzierungsansätze (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Verena Buren
Moving towards Ecological Validity: Conceptions and Measurement of Children’s Musicality (University of Gießen)
Camila Bruder
Investigating voice preferences with a multilevel empirical approach (University of Music, Freiburg)
2024
Johanna Will
Die Beziehung basaler und komplexer musikalischer Fähigkeiten: zeitlich-rhythmische Fähigkeiten und Tonvorstellungsfähigkeiten im Kindesalter (University of Gießen)
2023
Anna Czepiel
Assessing real-world music listening in concerts: Aesthetic experiences and peripheral physiological responses (Maastricht University)
2022
Christian Bär
Musikdiskurse. Sprachliche Muster, Dichte, Diversität im Sound populärer Musikrezensionen, Dissertation (University of Bremen)
Iris Mencke
Appreciating Musical Uncertainty – Characterizing the Cognitive, Neural and Affective Correlates of New Music, Dissertation (Goethe University Frankfurt)
2019
Taren Ackermann
"Disliked Music". Merkmale, Gründe und Funktionen abgelehnter Musik. Dissertation (University of Kassel)
2018
Julia Merrill
Stimmen – schön schrecklich oder schrecklich schön? Beschreibung, Bewertung und Wirkung des vokalen Ausdrucks in der Musik, Habilitation Musikwissenschaft (University of Kassel)
Thijs Vroegh
The pleasures of getting involved into the music: Absorption, and its role in the aesthetic appreciation of musik, Dissertation (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Fabian Greb
Determinants of Music-selection Behaviour: Development of a Model, Dissertation (Technische Universität Berlin)
2017
Paul Elvers
Music listening as self-enhancement: How empowering music affects self-esteem, Dissertation (Goethe University Frankfurt)
2014
Christoph Seibert
Musik und Affektivität: Systemtheoretische Perspektiven für eine transdisziplinäre Musikforschung, Dissertation (University of Music Karlsruhe)
Veröffentlicht als: Seibert, C. (2016): Musik und Affektivität: Systemtheoretische Perspektiven für eine transdisziplinäre Musikforschung. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft.