Dr. Steffen A. Herff

Dr. Steffen A. Herff is a Sydney Horizon Research Fellow and an ARC DECRA awardee at the University of Sydney, Australia. His research is situated at the intersection between Music, Imagination, Information Sampling, as well as Biofeedback and Neuroscience. His research investigates how humans perceive and process music, how music can be used to support well-being, and how we can help musicians avoid musculoskeletal disorders.

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 (A*STAR) 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. In 2024, Steffen joined the University of Sydney on a prestigious Sydney Horizon Fellowship to explore means of using music to improve wellbeing as well as develop new biofeedback systems to help musicians avoid musculoskeletal disorders.