Welcome! I study how people with varying degrees of hearing abilities and preferences make sense of musical sound. Starting in Oct 2025, I am based at the Institute of Music at the University of Oldenburg and funded through a Lower Saxony Impulse Professorship. I am also principal investigator in the Collaborative Research Center Hearing Acoustics. From 2023-2025 I was Professor of Communication Acoustics at Graz University of Technology, teaching in the Electrical Engineering and Sound Engineering program.
For more information, please visit the Oldenburg Music Perception Lab.
Picture: Die Junge Akademie/Peter Himsel
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CV
- Professor of Systematic Musicology, Institute of Music, University of Oldenburg, starting in Oct 2025. Funded by Lower Saxony Impulse Professorship.
- Early Career Award from the International Congress on Acoustics 2025
- Professor of Communication Acoustics, TU Graz, Dec 2023-Aug 2025
- Associate Editor, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2023-…
- Member, Die Junge Akademie, 2022-2027
- Principal Investigator, DFG Collaborative Research Center Hearing Acoustics, 2022-2026
- Lothar Cremer Preis of the German Acoustical Society, 2020
- Freigeist Fellow & Research group leader, University of Oldenburg, 2020-2025
- Postdoctoral fellow, University of Oldenburg, 2016–2019
- PhD in Music Technology, McGill University, Montreal, 2016
- Researcher, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), Vienna, 2012
- MSc (Diplom) in Mathematics (major) and Musicology (minor), Humboldt University Berlin, 2012
- Fulbright visiting student, University of California at Berkeley, 2008-2009
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Selected publications
R. Hake, D. Müllensiefen, and K. Siedenburg (2025). Individual differences in auditory scene analysis abilities in music and speech. Scientific Reports, 15(1):24048, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-10263-z
K. Siedenburg, M. Bürgel, E. Özgür, C. Scheicht, & S. Toepken(2024). Vibrotactile enhancement of musical engagement. Scientific Reports, 14(7764), 1-9, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-57961-8
R. Hake, M. Bürgel, N.K. Nguyen, A. Greasley, D. Müllensiefen, K. Siedenburg (2023). Development of an adaptive test of musical scene analysis abilities for normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners. Behavior Research Methods, https://doi.org/2010.3758/s13428-023-02279-y
K. Siedenburg, J. Graves, D. Pressnitzer (2023). A unitary model of frequency change perception. PLOS Computational Biology, 19(1): e1010307, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010307
Siedenburg, K., Barg, F. M., and Schepker, H. (2021). Adaptive auditory brightness perception. Scientific Reports, 11(1):1–11, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598–021–00707–7.
K. Siedenburg, C. Saitis, S. McAdams, A. Popper, R. Fay (2019). Timbre: Acoustics, Perception, and Cognition, Springer Handbook of Auditory Research Series, New York, NY: Springer
K. Siedenburg (2018). Timbral Shepard-illusion reveals perceptual ambiguity and context sensitivity of brightness perception. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 143(2), EL-00691
K. Siedenburg & S. Doclo (2017). Iterative structured shrinkage algorithms for stationary/transient audio separation. 20th Int. Conf. on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx-17), Edinburgh, UK, Sep 5–8, 2017 [Best Paper Award]
K. Siedenburg & S. McAdams (2017). Four conceptual distinctions for the auditory ‘wastebasket’ of timbre. Frontiers in Psychology (Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience), 8:1747, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01747
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Impressions
Golden Ear Challenge in Bremen, Hannover, Oldenburg, Hamburg, Fall 2024
Golden Ear Trophy from Music & Hearing Health Workshop, Oct 2022, Oldenburg
Group photo at auditory scene analysis symposium at the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg, March 2019.
Marie Skłodowska-Curie’s balkony. Visiting ENS Paris, March 2019
DAFX 2017!
Bringing together my Montreal teachers Stephen McAdams and Robert Hasegawa, good old Helmholtz, snow, and my former alma mater Humboldt University Berlin.
Berlin Interdisciplinary Workshop on Timbre, Berlin 2017.
Getting ready for my doctoral defense, Montreal, March 2016.
kai siedenburg 