I study music perception and how people with diverse hearing profiles make sense of musical sound. This involves exploring questions such as What are the key acoustic features and perceptual processes that influence musical experience of people with hearing loss? How do individual differences such as age, memory, and musical background, along with differences in hearing profiles, influence music perception? How can we enable immersive music experiences for people with different hearing profiles and hearing aids through acoustic or vibrotactile enhancement? 

I have a multidisciplinary academic background straddling between science and music. I studied mathematics and musicology at Humboldt University in Berlin, the University of California, Berkeley (USA), and the University of Vienna (Austria). I then obtained my doctorate in music technology at McGill University in Montréal (Canada) with work on the perception of musical timbre. In 2016, I joined the University of Oldenburg as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow and from 2020 onwards  directed the Oldenburg Music Perception & Processing Lab. From 2023-2025, I served as Professor of Communication Acoustics at TU Graz. Since 2025, I am Professor Systematic Musicology at the Institute of Music at the University of Oldenburg, supported through a Lower Saxony Impulse Professorship.  
 

• Music perception and cognition
• Psychoacoustics
• Music and hearing health

• PhD in Music Technology, McGill University, Montreal, May 2016
• MSc (Diplom) in Mathematics (major) and Musicology (minor), Humboldt University Berlin, Jan 2012
• Visiting student in Mathematics, University of Vienna, 2011
• Fulbright visiting student in Music and Mathematics, University of California at Berkeley,  2008-2009 

• Lower Saxony Impulse Professorship, 2025
• Early Career Award of the International Congress on Acoustics, 2025
• Associate Editor, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, since 2023
• Elected Member, Die Junge Akademie, 2022-2027
• Lothar-Cremer Price of the German Acoustical Society (DEGA), 2020
• Freigeist Fellowship, Volkswagen Foundation, 2020-2025
• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship, H2020 Reintegration Panel, 2018-2020
• Best Paper Award (1st prize), 20th Int. Conf. on Digital Audio Effects (DAFX), Edinburgh, UK, 2017
• Harman Scholar, Audio Engineering Society (AES) Educational Foundation, 2013-2015
• Fulbright Scholar, J. William Fulbright Commission, 2008-2009
• German National Academic Foundation, 2005-2011

For a complete list of publications, see here.

Systematic Musicology is a subdiscipline of musicology that studies music through scientific, theoretical, and interdisciplinary approaches, rather than historical or cultural contexts (which are the focus of historical and ethnomusicology). It draws on methods and theories from fields such as Psychology (music perception and cognition), Acoustics and physics (sound generation and analysis), Sociology (music in society), Philosophy (aesthetics and meaning in music), and Informatics (music information retrieval, AI in music). Three characteristic features of Systematic Musicology are: (i) it focuses on foundational aspects of music (e.g., pitch, rhythm, harmony, timbre, perceiving and eliciting emotions through music, musical expectancy, etc.); (ii) it aims for generalizable knowledge about how music works or how people interact with music; (iii) it includes both empirical research (e.g., experiments, data analysis) and theoretical work (e.g., modeling, conceptual analysis). Thus, Systematic Musicology is close to what is called Music Science/Technology in the anglophone sphere.