Mats B. Küssner

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• PhD
• Lecturer at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Music performance anxiety (MPA) is a deeply personal and often debilitating experience, causing talented musicians to dread the very stages upon which they showcase their art. An increasing number of studies have addressed this anxiety phenomenon, however, definitions vary and the underlying causes remain unclear. According to the DSM-5, MPA is cat...

Visual mental imagery has been characterized as an important aspect of our mental life, which consists of "seeing" in the absence of a sensory stimulus. However, the mechanisms underlying how visual mental images unfold during music listening have remained largely neglected. Here, we review the existing literature on the relation between music-evok...

There is growing evidence that music can induce a wide range of visual imagery. To date, however, there have been few thorough investigations into the specific content of music-induced visual imagery, and whether listeners exhibit consistency within themselves and with one another regarding their visual imagery content. We recruited an online sampl...

People are living longer than ever. Loneliness is prevalent across various age groups, posing a serious threat to both wellbeing and health. The social surrogacy hypothesis predicts that people make use of temporary substitutes for interaction with other people. In this qualitative study, we explored the role of self-chosen music as a social surrog...

Dissonant stimuli or stimuli with high auditory roughness are often related to jagged shapes, while consonant stimuli or those with low auditory roughness are associated with curvy and smooth shapes. This empirical study explores auditory-tactile associations for roughness in diverse musical excerpts. We investigate whether auditory harmonic disson...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0293412.].

Positive effects of improvisation on musicians have been demonstrated many times in theoretical literature but have rarely been empirically studied. This article uses empirical methods to investigate the influence of improvisation on holistic wellbeing at the instrument. The aim is to explore whether improvisation as a warm-up has positive effects...

Dissonant stimuli or stimuli with high auditory roughness are often related to jagged shapes, while consonant stimuli or those with low auditory roughness are associated with curvy and smooth shapes. This comprehensive empirical study explores auditory-tactile associations for roughness in diverse musical excerpts. We investigate whether auditory h...

The present study proposes a new approach to musical referentiality and its alleged tendency to relate to bodily experience and movement. To address this, we collected a corpus of 38,587 words (2,265 verbal descriptions of ‘associations’ or ‘imagery’ sparked by short musical excerpts by 554 participants from 32 countries). We tested the hypotheses...

Visual imagery has been proposed to be one of eight mechanisms by which music induces emotion in listeners. Initial research into aphantasia, a condition referring to individuals who do not (or only minimally) form visual imagery in their mind's eye, suggests that aphantasics may experience reduced emotional experiences in response to imagined stim...

Introduction Music is known to elicit strong emotions in listeners, and, if primed appropriately, can give rise to specific and observable crossmodal correspondences. This study aimed to assess two primary objectives: (1) identifying crossmodal correspondences emerging from music-induced emotions, and (2) examining the predictability of music-induc...

Music performance anxiety (MPA) is described as a complex phenomenon that arises through an interplay of environmental and personal factors. While previous research has found links between early life experiences and personality traits, the causes and the development of MPA remain poorly understood. This study aimed to assess the role of parenting s...

Synaesthesia is a condition in which a sensory stimulus does not only activate a specific sense—such as when sound waves activate our hearing—but also concurrently, automatically, and involuntarily stimulates another modality (e.g., vision). Music-induced visual mental imagery (VMI) shares some of its features with synaesthesia, the most obvious be...

Music has the capability to trigger visual mental imagery (VMI), often leading to constructed imaginative worlds in the mind of the listener. Although VMI has been a topic of interest throughout centuries and across various disciplines including philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and visual arts, its relationship to musical contexts remains elusiv...

Drawing on perspectives from music psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, musicology, clinical psychology, and music education, Music and Mental Imagery provides a critical overview of cutting-edge research on the various types of mental imagery associated with music. The four main parts cover an introduction to the different types of ment...

During a live concert, the mind can wander to unrelated thoughts such as personal concerns or past memories or to vivid images that are inspired by the music. This is an omnipresent phenomenon commonly referred to as mind-wandering. Psychological research on mind-wandering has explored its main characteristics, such as frequency, phenomenology, and...

Creativity plays a major role in various musical contexts including composition, performance and education. Although numerous studies have revealed how creativity is involved in processes of listening, improvising and composing, relatively little is known about the particularities of transcultural creative processes in music. In this article, we ai...

Artist management or mentoring is generally recognized as a fundamental challenge and contributing element to an artist's success. This article takes the position that artist management should go well beyond the narrow confines of standard business practice focused on traditional business management, marketing, accounting and finance extending into...

Duo musicians exhibit a broad variety of bodily gestures, but it is unclear how soloists’ and accompanists’ movements differ and to what extent they attract observers’ visual attention. In Experiment 1, seven musical duos’ body movements were tracked while they performed two pieces in two different conditions. In a congruent condition, soloist and...

Duo musicians exhibit a broad variety of bodily gestures, but it is unclear how soloists’ and accompanists’ movements differ and to what extent they attract observers’ visual attention. In Experiment 1, seven musical duos’ body movements were tracked while they performed two pieces in two different conditions. In a congruent condition, soloist and...

Visual mental imagery has been proposed to be an underlying mechanism of music-induced emotion, yet very little is known about the phenomenon due to its ephemeral nature. The present study utilised a saccadic eye-movement task designed to suppress visual imagery during music listening. Thirty-five participants took part in Distractor (eye-movement)...

Background: Composition and improvisation as generative musical processes are often presented in the literature as endpoints of a continuum (Lehmann, 2005; Pressing, 1984), although a strict separation can be doubted from a cognitive science perspective. Therefore, in order to critically reflect on the Western-influenced conceptual differentiation...

In this article, we report data from two survey studies administered to expert music teachers. Both questionnaires aimed to explore teachers’ pedagogical and performative practice and included open questions elucidating musical skills emerging in groups. The first study focuses on collective teaching settings offered to amateurs, jazz musicians, an...

Studies have suggested that visual imagery forms an important part of the listening experience and might be one of the mechanisms by which music induces emotions in a listener. However, little is known about the content, prevalence, and function of visual imagery during music listening. To that end, an online survey was constructed to explore music...

Visual mental imagery has been characterized as an important aspect of our mental life, which consists of “seeing” in the absence of a sensory stimulus. However, the mechanisms underlying how visual mental images unfold during music listening have remained largely neglected. Here, we review the existing literature on the relation between music-evok...

While Wagner and his music have been studied extensively from musicological and music-theoretical perspectives, recent scientific approaches shed light on perceptual processes implicated in the experience of Wagner's music, yielding important insights into the (re)cognition of musical form. Since findings from such studies are mainly discussed with...

The question of whether background music is able to enhance cognitive task performance is of interest to scholars, educators, and stakeholders in business alike. Studies have shown that background music can have beneficial, detrimental or no effects on cognitive task performance. Extraversion—and its postulated underlying cause, cortical arousal—is...

As tantalizing as the idea that background music beneficially affects foreign vocabulary learning may seem, there is-partly due to a lack of theory-driven research-no consistent evidence to support this notion. We investigated inter-individual differences in the effects of background music on foreign vocabulary learning. Based on Eysenck's theory o...

Dataset of Experiment 2 for analyses by participants. (XLS)

Dataset of Experiment 2 for analyses by items. (XLS)

Dataset of Experiment 1 for analyses by items. (XLS)

Dataset of Experiment 1 for analyses by participants. (XLS)

Music as a multimodal phenomenon promises to provide new insights into music cognition. Studied from an embodied perspective, body movements play a major role in our musical experiences. Here we address how motor invariants such as the two-thirds power law relate to music cognition. A sample of 64 musically trained and untrained participants were a...

This thesis investigates the notion of shape in music from a psychological perspective. Rooted in the embodied cognition research programme, it seeks to understand what kinds of shapes listeners with varying levels of musical expertise perceive in sound and music by engaging them in overt actions. To that end, two empirical studies have been carrie...

Cross-modal mappings of auditory stimuli reveal valuable insights into how humans make sense of sound and music. Whereas researchers have investigated cross-modal mappings of sound features varied in isolation within paradigms such as speeded classification and forced-choice matching tasks, investigations of representations of concurrently varied s...

Research on auditory-visual correspondences has a long tradition but innovative experimental paradigms and analytic tools are sparse. In this study, we explore different ways of analysing real-time visual representations of sound and music drawn by both musically-trained and untrained individuals. To that end, participants' drawing responses captur...

Musicians and other music professionals often use the notion of shape when they talk or think about musical performances, and yet, until recently, there has been little research into what shape actually refers to. 'Shaping music in performance', a research project based in the Music Department at King's College London and part of the AHRC Research...

This study investigates neural correlates of music-evoked fear and joy with fMRI. Studies on neural correlates of music-evoked fear are scant, and there are only a few studies on neural correlates of joy in general. Eighteen individuals listened to excerpts of fear-evoking, joy-evoking, as well as neutral music and rated their own emotional state i...

Previous research comparing musically trained and untrained individuals has yielded valuable insights into music cognition and behaviour. Here, we explore two aspects of musical engagement previously studied separately, auditory-visual correspondences and sensorimotor skills, in a novel real-time drawing paradigm. To that end, musically trained and...

Musical training has an impact on the development and enhancement of a number of perceptual, cognitive, sensory-motor and social skills. Whereas some of these skills may be context- or instrument-specific, others are likely to be more generalizable. The focus of this paper is on two particularly well-developed characteristics of musicians: processi...

In this paper we describe two projects aiming to shed light on the notion of shape, a concept widely used by musicians to refer to various musical characteristics but one that has so far been almost entirely neglected by the research community. Project 1 is a study examining how musicians and non-musicians represent sound visually, making use of an...

Visualising sound and music can give rise to valuable insights into music cognition. In this experiment, musicians and non- musicians were presented with pure tones, systematically varied in pitch, loudness and tempo, as well as two short musical excerpts. Visual responses were captured using an electronic graphics tablet, and continuously acquired...

SysMus10, the third International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology, was held at the University of Cambridge, UK, in September 2010. The conference was organised by PhD students at the Centre for Music and Science in the University’s Faculty of Music. SysMus10 brought together around 40 advanced students working in the field of system...