The Cologne Systematic Musicology Lab (CSML) under the direction of Prof. Dr. Hauke Egermann works with empirical methods to investigate the production and reception of music in a wide variety of media and non-media contexts.

The research focuses on a wide variety of areas, in particular the following:

• Music and Emotion
• Concert and Audience Research
• Empirical Aesthetics of Music
• Embodied Music Cognition
• Performance Research
• Intercultural Music Cognition
• Digital Music Media and Technology

How do music listeners/creators react physically to music performed live or to music on a streaming service? What do they report about their emotions or cognitions and what kind of behavior do they display? In CSML's empirical research, quantitative and qualitative methods, physiological measurements and computational analyses are linked together in order to explore current research questions in all their complexity.

Group members are: 

• Prof. Dr. Hauke Egermann (Director)
• Maren Hochgesand, M.A.
• Martin Kreuzer, M.Ed.
• Dr. Andreas Gernemann-Paulsen
• Luca Matsukawa, B.A.
• Valentino Tonnicchi
• Lily Hußmann, B.A.
• Tal Riva Theodorou

Recent publications

• Hochgesand, M., & Egermann, H. (2025). Exploring movement entrainment in an ecologically valid concert setting. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 31796. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-13376-7
• Kreuzer, M., Wald-Fuhrmann, M., Weining, C., Tröndle, M., & Egermann, H. (2025). Western Classical Music Concerts Are More Immersive, Intellectually Stimulating, and Social, When Experienced Live Rather Than in a Digital Stream. An Ecologically Valid Concert Study on Different Modes of Liveness. Music & Science, 8. https://doi.org/10.1177/20592043251333995
• Kreuzer, M., Wald-Fuhrmann, M., Weining, C., Meier, D., O’Neill, K., Tschacher, W., Tröndle, M., & Egermann, H. (2023). Digital Concert Experience: An Online Research Project on Live Streaming During the Pandemic. In S. Lepa, R. Müller-Lindenberg, & H. Egermann (Eds.), Classical Music and Opera During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic: Empirical Research on the Digital Transformation of Socio-cultural Institutions and Aesthetic Forms (pp. 95-112). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42975-0_6

With sensors from the company Shimmer Sensing, the CSML has a mobile audience response system that can measure physical (e.g. movement) and physiological (e.g. heart rate, skin conductance) reactions. This allows the live experience of an entire audience to be recorded simultaneously (projects). The system could also be used in many other contexts - for example to record physiological data from musicians in order to understand musical performance more precisely.