The focus of the Music Department is on developing multi-methodical research designs with a pronouncedly interdisciplinary orientation. Located at the juncture of the humanities and natural sciences, these designs are aimed at finding new answers to old questions: What is music? Why do people make music? And what do they experience through it? In the framework of an empirical aesthetics, the thematic areas of production and reception are especially foregrounded—hence making, perceiving, experiencing, understanding, and assessing music. Forms of musical expression in their cultural, social, and historical specificity here play an important role, as do the recipients themselves.

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In this framework, the problems posed and solutions found within the historical-aesthetic, theoretical, pedagogic, sociological, ethnological, psychological, and neuroscientific areas of research on music—areas in part operating at great mutual distance—are meant to be placed in systematic relationship to each other. In this way a dialog will be established concerning the possibilities, scope, and limits of the different methods and models.

The systematic empirical approach has a long tradition in musical research, especially in the field of musicology, with a significance that is nothing short of identity-founding. In fact, the foundational myth of musical research itself involves an act of empirical aesthetics. Pythagoras is supposed to have recognized consonances – regarded even then as having aesthetic value – in the harmony of some hammers in a smithy and wondered what had brought them about. On the basis of measurements made in the smithy itself and further calculations at home he discovered that musical intervals were based on the simple relations of natural numbers, and that the degree of harmony was directly correlated with the simplicity of the numbers: an aesthetics of production and aesthetics of reception at one and the same time. ###

Since then speculation on music’s aesthetics and the laws that govern it have been inseparable from mathematics or indeed – from the Early Modern period onwards – from physics. The “natural law” of musical beauty gave rise to many aesthetic theories up to and including Fechner’s basic criteria for aesthetic pleasure.
It was the growing familiarity with non-European sound systems, the extension of music’s historical horizon, and the assaults on existing taboos by the New Music, though, that finally undermined the belief that there was no alternative to the Western system of major/minor tonality. New findings concerning the primarily socio-cultural conditions in which taste is formed also changed the emphasis from a search for biologically grounded patterns to an identification of differences and mutabilities. Over the course of this transition, sight was almost lost of the degree to which this multiplicity of phenomena could be covered by the – admittedly Eurocentric – term “music”.

In its founding phase the Music Division will pay special attention to the fields of “experiencing” and “evaluating.” In the framework of basic research on aesthetics, existing models and methods will here be examined, and developed, together with new concepts and tools. Projects prepared individually by single members of the departmen will be structurally and substantively supplemented by projects prepared in interdisciplinary groups within the research areas described below.

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The team is constituted along interdisciplinary lines, with collaboration between sociologists of music, experimental psychologists, neuro-scientists, and sound editors, as well as a linguist and a music therapist—all working together with representatives of historical and systematic musicology as well as ethnomusicology. In addition, there are ongoing contacts between the department and musical educators, theorists, alongside Frankfurt’s music-centered institutes such as the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, the Ensemble Modern / Internationale Ensemble Modern Akademie, the Museumsgesellschaft, and the Alte Oper.

Cohrdes, C., Wrzus, C., Wald-Fuhrmann, M., & Riediger, M. (2018). „The sound of affect”: Age differences in perceiving valence and arousal in music and their relation to music characteristics and momentary mood. Musicae Scientiae. 1-23. 2018. doi:10.1177/1029864918765613

Greb, F., Steffens, J., & Schlotz, W. (2018). Understanding music-selection behavior via statistical learning: Using the percentile-Lasso to identify the most important factors. Music & Science, 1. doi:10.1177/2059204318755950

Elvers, P., & Steffens, J. (2017) The Sound of Success: Investigating Cognitive and Behavioral Effects of Motivational Music in Sports.Frontieres in Psychology 8. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02026

Elvers, P., Fischinger, T. & Steffens, S. (2017). Music listening as self-enhancement: Effects of empowering music on explicit and implicit momentary self-esteem. Psychology of Music. First published online: June 3, 2017. doi: 10.1177/0305735617707354

Merrill, J. & Larrouy-Maestri, P. (2017). Vocal Features of Song and Speech. Insights from Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. In Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1-11. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01108

Scheideler, U., & Wörner, F. (Vol.-Eds.). Grimm, H., & Wald-Fuhrmann, M. (Series-Eds.). (2017). Lexikon Schriften über Musik: Vol. 1. Musiktheorie von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Kassel/Stuttgart: Bärenreiter/Metzler

Kaufmann, M. (2017). Tränen und Drama. Domenico Mazzocchis musikalische Inszenierung der Klage. Die Tonkunst, 11(2), pp. 185–195.

Wald-Fuhrmann, M. (2017). Ursprungsmythen als Wesensbestimmungen in der Musik. In S. Wegner (Hrsg.) Über den Ursprung von Musik. Mythen, Legenden und Geschichtsschreibungen (S. 39- 48). Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann. 

London, J., Polak, R., & Jacoby, N. (2017). Rhythm histograms and musical meter: A corpus study of Malian percussion music. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24(2), 474-480. DOI 10.3758/s13423-016-1093-7

Neuhoff, H., Polak, R., & Fischinger, T. (2017). Perception and Evaluation of Timing Patterns in Drum Ensemble Music from Mali. Music Perception, 34(4), 438–451. DOI: 10.1525/mp.2017.34.4.438