Dr Steffen A. Herff

Research Program: Music Cognition and Action  

Position

DECRA Research Fellow

Roles

• DECRA Research Fellow. MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour, and Development (Since 2022)
• Principal Investigator. SPARK project, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland (2021-2022)
• Postdoctoral Researcher. Digital and Cognitive Musicology Lab, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland (2019-2022)
• Adjunct Fellow. The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour, and Development, Western Sydney University (WSU), Australia (Since 2018)
• Research Scientist. Institute of High-Performance Computing, Social & Cognitive Computing, Music Cognition Group, A*STAR, Singapore (2017-2019)
• Principal Investigator. UA-DAAD project, Heinrich-Heine University, Germany / Western Sydney University, Australia (2017)

Biography

Steffen graduated in Psychology at the Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf in Germany before going on to complete his PhD at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour, and Development focusing on 'Memory for Melody' in 2017.

After his PhD, Steffen secured a DAAD-UA grant to conduct the "Noisy Ear" project in Germany, exploring context effects of background noise on memory before accepting a position at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore, where he worked on Statistical Learning and Memory in the auditory domain.

In 2019, Steffen joined the Digital Cognitive Musicology Lab at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, on the ERC grant “Principles of Musical Structure Building: Theory, Computation, and Cognition” to lead the empirical efforts of the project. Shortly after, he secured the SPARK grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation to lead a separate research stream on music-induced imagination.

In 2021, Steffen won a three-year ARC DECRA to further research imagination, music, and how they interact.
His current research is situated at the intersection between Memory, Music, Imagination, Information Sampling, and Neuroscience. The projects range from fundamental memory, learning, and perception research as well as modelling of information sampling in ageing and mood disorders, over social negotiation between musical co-performers, the creation of new compositional tools, and empirically investigating how musical features affect imagination, to non-invasive (e.g., EEG, MEG) and invasive brain imaging (e.g., ECoG) in musical rhythm perception as well as brain stimulation to modulate memory encoding.

Research Interests

• Music Perception & Cognition
• Memory
• Imagination
• Statistics & Experimental Design
• Cognitive Science
• Neuroscience

Please feel free to get in touch for collaborations, supervision, or just a friendly chat, if you are interested in any of these topics.

Qualifications and Honours

• Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Western Sydney University, Australia
• Master of Science (Psychology), Heinrich-Heine University, German (converted to PhD at WSU)
• Bachelor of Science (Psychology), Heinrich-Heine University, Germany
• Grant. Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) from the Australian Research Council for the project 'The Musical Escape: Investigating Music and Imagination' (2021)
• Grant. SPARK grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation for the project 'Wanderful music: A systematic investigation into music-induced mind wandering' (2020)
• Grant. CEPET Seed Grant from Macquarie University, Sydney for the project 'Memory as a proxy for perceptual expertise: Testing a novel Regenerative-Multiple-Representation model of memory' (2018)
• Grant. Australia-Germany Joint Research Cooperation Scheme from UA-DAAD for the project ‘The noisy ear; the influence of background noise on day-to-day listening’ (2017)

Publications

A listing of my publications can be found on my Google Scholar page(opens in a new window)

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