People

Dr. Laurien Hakvoort, lecturer - ArtEZ

Dr. Laurien Hakvoort is a registered (Neurologic) Music Therapist and voice major. She is lecturer of music therapy approaches at ArtEZ University of the Arts, Netherlands and at University Palackého in Olomouci, Czech Republic. She is a freelance researcher and published various (inter)national articles and (chapters in) books on music therapy and addiction, forensic psychiatry, trauma, music-technology, and mistakes. 

Dr. Rebecca Schaefer, Associate Professor - Leiden University

Rebecca Schaefer is an Associate Professor in Clinical Neuropsychology as well as the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, and leads the 'Music, Brain, Health & Technology' group. Their research is mainly focused on clinical applications of music and the related neural processes, as well as the possibilities of novel technological advances towards the use of music technology for health. Examples of topic areas are moving to music, music imagery, and effects of music on other functions, such as cognition or reward, but also the underlying principles of learning musical skills. Before coming to Leiden University, she held a SAGE Jr research fellowship at UC Santa Barbara, USA, and a European Marie Curie fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, UK. More information on her research and the group is available at www.rebeccaschaefer.net.

Fleur Bouwer, Assistant Professor – Leiden University

Fleur Bouwer is an assistant professor in the Cognitive Psychology Unit, at the Institute of Psychology of Leiden University, interested in the cognitive neuroscience of music in general, and rhythm cognition in particular. She was awarded a personal NWO Veni grant in 2020 to examine how the human brain forms temporal expectations in musical rhythm. In 2016, Fleur obtained her PhD on the topic of beat perception at the UvA, supervised by Prof. Dr. Henkjan Honing. She continued her work on expectations in rhythm on a personal ABC Talent grant at the UvA and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, supervised by Prof. Dr. Heleen Slagter. Fleur has a combined background in music (as a performing clarinettist) and cognitive neuroscience. In her research, she combines her fascination for the human brain and passion for music, while using techniques such as EEG and fMRI to uncover the neural underpinnings of rhythmic behavior. In addition to her work as a researcher, Fleur is an enthusiastic and experienced educator, both in teaching courses at the bachelor and master level, and as a public speaker.

Ned McGowan, PhD student - Leiden University

Ned McGowan is a composer, flutist, researcher and teacher, born in the United States and living in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Known for rhythmical vitality and technical virtuosity, his music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, the Concertgebouw and other halls and festivals around the world by many orchestras, ensembles and soloists. As a flutist he plays classical, contemporary and improvisation concerts internationally and he has a special love for the contrabass flute. Ned teaches composition, Advanced Rhythm and Pulse, and is Head of Artistic Research at the Utrecht Conservatory. Hi is currently a PhD candidate at the Leiden University and the DocARTES program in Ghent, on the topic of speed in music, and is the founder and director of the International Rhythm Course, a series of course in Utrecht and India dedicated to learning, exploring and performing rhythm.

Website: www.nedmcgowan.com 

Helmke Jansen, teaching and research assistant - Leiden University

Helmke Jansen (MSc) works as a teaching- and research assistant at Leiden University, she is involved in the elective Music Cognition of Rebecca Schaeffer and the Snaartje Festival of a.o. Fleur Bouwer. She also works as education coordinator and policy officer at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, and as freelance oboist with various professional orchestras and ensembles. Helmke obtained a Master of Science in 'Clinical Child and Adolescent Studies' from Leiden University and a Master of Music with distinction from the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. An internship in special education inspired her to study music perception with a focus on autism spectrum disorders. From then on, she has been fascinated by the research field of music psychology. Coming from her two study backgrounds, Helmke is intrigued by the connection between humans and music.

Sonja Kotz, Professor - Maastricht University

Sonja A. Kotz is a translational cognitive and affective neuroscientist, who investigates the neural and behavioural foundations of prediction (temporal and formal) in multiple domains (perception, action, music, speech, communication) in healthy and clinical populations. She also pursues comparative research (macaque monkey, rat, seal) on the evolution of time and rhythm processing in their own right but also as the building blocks of higher-level cognitive processes (music, speech). In her research she uses cutting edge behavioural and neuroimaging techniques (E/MEG, s/fMRI, TMS) and analyses. She holds a Chair in Translational Cognitive Neuroscience at Maastricht University (UM), is the Section Head of Neuropsychology and the Chair of the Research Council at the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience at UM, holds honorary professorships at the University of Manchester (UK), University of Leipzig (Germany), University of Lisbon (Portugal), associate fellowships and positions at Georgetown University (Washington, D.C., USA) and the International Laboratory for Brain, Music, and Sound Research (BRAMS, Montreal, Canada), works on the editorial board of several impact journals (e.g., Neuroimage, Cortex, PLoS ONE etc.), and serves as a panel chair/member on several European grant agencies. You can find more about Sonja and her team at: www.band-lab.com.

Kelsey Onderdijk, PostDoc - Tilburg University

Kelsey E. Onderdijk is a post-doctoral researcher at the department of Communication and Cognition at Tilburg University. She conducts research at the intersection of cognition and XR technologies, examining information processing and technological affordances. Previously, she obtained her doctoral degree at IPEM, Ghent University, specializing in concepts such as unity, connectedness and agency in virtually mediated musical contexts (e.g., livestreams, virtual reality, networked music making). She also investigated the influence of AI perceptions and individual differences on VR concert experiences during her time as visiting researcher at the Music Cognition Group at the University of Amsterdam. In 2022 she was chair of the SysMus conference. Feel free to reach out!

Anja Volk, Professor - Utrecht University

Anja Volk (MA, MSc, PhD), Professor of Music Information Computing (Utrecht University) has a dual background in mathematics and musicology which she applies to cross-disciplinary approaches to music. She has an international reputation in the areas of music information retrieval (MIR), computational musicology, and mathematical music theory. Her work has helped bridge the gap between scientific and humanistic approaches tot he study of music while working in interdisciplinary research teams in Germany, the USA and the Netherlands. In 2011, she started her own research group at Utrecht University at the intersection of MIR, musicology and cognition. Her research aims at enhancing our understanding of music as a fundamental human trait while applying these insights for developing music technologies that offer new ways of interacting with music. She has co-founded several international initiatives, most notably the International Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music (SMCM), the flagship journal of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (TISMIR), and the Women in MIR (WIMIR) mentoring program.

Frans Wiering, Associate Professor - Utrecht University

Frans Wiering received a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) for his thesis The Language of the Modes. Studies in the History of Polyphonic Modality (1995). He is Associate Professor at the Interaction Technology division of the Department of Information and Computing Sciences of Utrecht University (Netherlands). He has taught both in the Information Science and Computer Science programmes.

His research is at the intersection of computer science and music, connecting computer science methodology to state-of-the-art domain knowledge of music. The three main areas of his research are music information retrieval (projects WITCHCRAFT, C-Minor, COGITCH, MUSIVA), computational musicology (Tunes and Tales, Transforming Musicology) and music technology for games and virtual worlds (COMMIT work package Sensing Emotion in Music). He is the founder of the Thesaurus musicarum italicarum (https://tmiweb.science.uu.nl/), a corpus of online music treatises by Gioseffo Zarlino and his contemporaries. He was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University and a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He co-organised the Dagstuhl Seminar Knowledge representation for intelligent music processing (2009), and was General Chair of Eleventh International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2010) and Program Chair of ISMIR 2015. He co-chairs the International Musicological Society’s Study Group on Digital Musicology.

Mirjam Visscher, PhD student - Utrecht University

Mirjam Visscher is a PhD candidate in the Information and Computing Sciences department at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. As a member of the Music Information Computing group, she investigates the development of tonal structures in 16th and 17th-century music using a big data approach, with audio as a primary source. She graduated in musicology in 2006, with a specialization in medieval studies and a research emphasis on acoustics of woodwind instruments.

She has a strong track record in teaching and has 15 years of experience in various industry roles, including railway analyst, business economics advisor and project lead.

Karlijn Dinnissen, PhD student - Utrecht University

Karlijn Dinnissen is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where she is part of the Human-Centered Computing group. Her research focuses on fairness and transparency in music recommender systems, where she combines her practical experience as an NLP engineer with her academic background in Communication and Information Sciences. This results in interdisciplinary, human-focused scientific research projects. Last summer, Karlijn was also engaged in a Research Scientist Internship with Spotify's Tech Research team. 

Yke Schotanus, affiliated researcher - Utrecht University

Yke Paul Schotanus (Scheveningen, 1963) is an affiliated researcher at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) at Utrecht University. In 2020 he was awarded a PhD for his dissertation: Singing as a figure of speech, music as punctuation: A study into music as a means to support the processing of sung language. His research area is the effect of singing on focusing on and memorizing texts, the interpretation of those texts, and the consequences of this on the position of sung texts in education, health care and literature. He is also a teacher of Dutch language and literature, author, writing coach, and singer-songwriter.

Peter van Kranenburg, lecturer - Utrecht University and researcher Meertens Institute

Peter van Kranenburg obtained master's degrees in Musicology (2004, Utrecht University) and Electrical Engineering (2003, Delft University of Technology). He developed machine-learning methods for studying musical authorship. As Ph.D. researcher at Utrecht University, he developed melodic similarity measures. At the Meertens Institute (Amsterdam) he contributed to the Database of Dutch Songs and conducted research on computational modelling of melody in oral transmission, including religious recitation and Medieval chant. Currently he is lecturer at Utrecht University, and researcher at the Meertens Institute (Amsterdam) in the EU-funded Polifonia project (2021-2024), which reconstructs connections between music, events, people, and places from the 16th century to the present day as knowledge graphs. Within the Polifonia-project, he is in the lead of two pilot projects, focussing on the origins of tunes in Dutch oral culture, and on digital representation of data on historical pipe organs.

Henkjan Honing, Professor - Universiteit van Amsterdam

Henkjan Honing is a professor of Music Cognition at both the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Science of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). He studies what musicality is, and to what extent human beings share musicality with other animals. His aim is to define the cognitive and biological mechanisms that underpin musicality. Honing has published over 250 scientific publications in journals ranging from Computer Music Journal, Topics in Cognitive Science and Cognition to PNAS, Philosophical Transactions B. and Animal Cognition. Next to a research agenda (The Origins of Musicality, The MIT Press), he has published several books for the general public, including the English-language publications Music Cognition: The Basics (Routledge) and The Evolving Animal Orchestra (The MIT Press). Henkjan Honing's books and lectures are popular with a broad audience and are appreciated both inside and outside the scientific world.

Makiko Sadakata, Assistant Professor - University of Amsterdam

Makiko Sadakata is an Assistant Professor at the Musicology Department at the University of Amsterdam, affiliated with the Music Cognition Group and ILLC (Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation). Her background is music composition,  psychology and cognitive science, with a specialised focus in association of music and language processing. Her current research focuses on a fascinating effect of repetition in sounds on our perception, especially when, how and why repetition musicalise sounds. 

Berit Janssen, scientific programmer - Universiteit van Amsterdam

Berit Janssen is a computational musicologist interested in music prediction and musical expectations. She obtained a Master degree in Systematic Musicology and English Literature at Hamburg University. For her PhD, she conducted research on stability and variation in folk song melodies at the Meertens Institute and the University of Amsterdam. She defended her dissertation titled “Retained or Lost in Transmission? Analyzing and Predicting Stability in Dutch Folk Songs” in 2018. She presented at various international conferences, such as ISMIR and SMPC, and published her work in proceedings and journals. Since 2017, she has been working as a scientific programmer for the Research Software Lab of Utrecht University’s Centre for Digital Humanities. In 2021, she rejoined the Music Cognition Group at the University of Amsterdam as a scientific programmer to develop the MUSCLE infrastructure, a reusable environment to run engaging online music experiments.

Michiel Schuijer - Head of research Conservatorium van Amsterdam

Michiel Schuijer is a musicologist and music theorist currently head​ of​ the research division at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. In his research, he explores historical, sociological, and cultural perspectives on music theory. His book Analyzing Atonal Music: Pitch-Class Set Theory and Its Contexts (University of Rochester Press, 2008) was awarded the American Society for Music Theory Emerging Scholar Award in 2010. Recent research interests include evolving notions of professionalism in music and the role of heritage in musical culture. From 2020 through 2022, Schuijer was project leader of the Academy for Musicology and Musicianship (Amsterdam, Utrecht), a study program combining the strengths of conservatory and university education. With John Koslovsky, he published an edited volume entitled Music Performance Encounters: Collaborations and Confrontations (Routledge, 2024), in which twenty-four scholars and musicians from around the world share their knowledge and expertise on musical practices from a wide variety of global cultures and sub-cultures.

Merel Vercammen - Artistic director of the SNAAR festival, violinist

Violinist Merel Vercammen graduated with honors from the Royal College of Music in London. She also obtained a Master of Science in Music Mind and Brain from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a Master of Art in Cultural Economics and Entrepreneurship from Erasmus University. Vercammen combines her interests in founding the SNAAR festival, a festival about the connection between science and music, which will have its first edition in 2022 in TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht.

As a violinist, Vercammen was a prize winner of the London Grand Prize Virtuoso Competition, the National Competition of the Stichting Jong Muziektalent Nederland and the Princess Christina Competition. She has performed all over the world and played in concert halls such as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg and the Wigmore Hall in London. Her debut album Symbiosis with pianist Dina Ivanova was released in March 2019 on Gutman Records, which received rave reviews in the press and made it into the Volkskrant album top 40 of 2019. The album The Zoo followed in September, on which Merel does something that is not usual in classical music: all tracks are improvised. This album was also received with critical acclaim.

Anemone van Zijl, BA, MPhil, MSc, PhD - HoGent

Department of Health, Education and Social Work Anemone works as a postdoctoral researcher in the international research project Music for Social Impact: Practitioners’ Contexts, Work and Beliefs. She has a background in Arts and Social Sciences (BA with distinction and MPhil, Maastricht University, The Netherlands) and Music Psychology (MSc with distinction, Keele University, United Kingdom). She obtained her PhD from the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. Her research focuses on the effect of performers’ emotions on performance characteristics and audience experience. She worked as a lecturer at the department of Music Education at the Maastricht Conservatory of Music, and at the department of Music Therapy at the HAN University of Applied Sciences. She has been research advisor of the ‘Creative Minds’ project, a consortium of researchers investigating the effects of art therapies on psycho-physiological processes at Zuyd University of Applied Sciences.

Hasselt-REVAL (Rehabilitation Research Center) and Ghent-IPEM (Institute of Psychoacoustic and Electronic Music),

Lousin Moumdjian, PostDoc - REVAL, Hasselt and IPEM, Ghent

Lousin Moumdjian is a physiotherapist by training and a rehabilitation scientist, with Armenian roots, born and raised in Kuwait. In 2017, Lousin obtained funding to start her own PhD work with universities of Hasselt-REVAL (Rehabilitation Research Center) and Ghent-IPEM (Institute of Psychoacoustic and Electronic Music), under the supervision of Prof. Feys and Prof. Leman respectively. With her PhD research, she investigated the effect of auditory-motor coupling on cognitive and motor functions in persons with multiple sclerosis. Today, Lousin continues her research lines, described as fundamental and translational research as an FWO postdoctoral researcher in Belgium (2022-2025) extending investigations on Sensori-Motor Interactions and Embodied Learning towards adult populations of progressive multiple sclerosis population, persons with cerebellar impairments, and paediatric populations such as children with Developmental Coordination Disorders. More information on the various research projects can be found on https://lousinmoumdjian.com/. 

Aleksandra Michałko, PhD student - IPEM, Ghent

Aleksandra Michałko is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Systematic Musicology (IPEM) in Ghent, Belgium. She holds a bachelor's degree in linguistics and literature, as well as master's degrees in music performance, cognitive and computational musicology. Her previous research focused on the effects of figurative language on music performance, as well as the underlying relationships between semantic labelling of musical timbre and the acoustic properties of flute sounds. Her current research focuses on the use of advanced technologies such as Augmented Reality and wearable robotics to facilitate learning and increase the efficiency of acquiring new motor skills in the context of instrumental music training (conbots.eu).

John Koslovsky, Assistant Professor – KU Leuven

John Koslovsky is a music theorist, analyst, and historian who focuses on music of the Classical and Romantic era. In the fall of 2023, he joined the musicology faculty at KU Leuven. From 2010 to 2023 he worked in the music theory and history department at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, during which time he was also an affiliate researcher in the humanities at Utrecht University. As a historian of music theory, he is interested in the dissemination and transmission of musical thought, whether from an analytic-formalist point of view, an aesthetic-philosophical one, or a performative-embodied one. He is also interested in aspects of linguistics that tie into the ways in which people communicate their analytical ideas and experiences with music in specific social and cultural contexts. He has published extensively on the history of Schenkerian theory, musical form, and music theory pedagogy, and he has also collaborated with artistic and performance researchers as part of his broader interest in musical discourses. At KU Leuven he teaches courses on music history and analysis of the Classical and Romantic periods; on music and philosophy; on music and performance; and on specialized analytical and historical topics around his research. Bio and publication list: https://www.kuleuven.be/wieiswie/en/person/00163102

Sylvie Nozaradan, Associate professor - Institute of Neuroscience, UCLouvain, Belgium

Sylvie Nozaradan, MD PhD, is Associate Professor at the Institute of Neuroscience of UCLouvain, Belgium, and head of the Brussels-based Rhythm & Brains Lab. The team is sponsored by local, national and international funding bodies including an ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council, and also the Australian Research Council (ARC), promoting collaborations within and outside Europe. Previously, Sylvie received an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, to develop her research independently at the MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University (Australia), with the mentorship of Pr. Peter Keller. Sylvie has a PhD degree in neuroscience from UCLouvain (supervisor: Pr. André Mouraux) and the BRAMS, Montreal, Canada (supervisor: Pr. Isabelle Peretz), where she investigated neural entrainment to musical rhythm. She has a dual background in music (Master in piano, Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles, Belgium) and science (medical doctor, UCLouvain).

Sylvie’s research group, the Rhythm and Brains Lab, aims to better understand the brain processes responsible for the ability of humans to perceive and move to musical rhythm. To this aim, they use functional neuroimaging techniques (scalp and intracerebral EEG, functional MRI) and non-invasive neuromodulation techniques (transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS, transcutaneous direct current stimulation) combined with novel techniques to selectively tag the brain activity in response to rhythmic sensory inputs such as music, rhythmic visual objects, rhythmic tactile input or rhythmic movement of the body. The goal of this research is to understand how the human brain is able to make sense of and produce musical rhythm, how this ability is influenced by a number of factors such as cultural background, inter-individual differences, musical training, recent context, attention or body movement. Moreover, we investigate how our ability for musical rhythm is affected by lesions in particular areas of the brain, and in turn how musical rhythm can help brain-damaged patients to recover from auditory or motor deficits.

Geraint Wiggins, Full professor - AI Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Geraint A. Wiggins studied Mathematics and Computer Science at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and holds PhDs in Artificial Intelligence and in Musical Composition, from the University of Edinburgh. He is Professor of Computational Creativity in the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Previously, he was Head of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London. He is Associate Editor (English) of Musicae Scientiae, the journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, a consulting editor of Music Perception and an editorial board member of the Journal of New Music Research. From 2000 to 2004, he chaired the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour, the UK learned society for Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, and from 2004 to 2014, he chaired the international Association for Computational Creativity, of whose Journal he is now Editor-in-Chief. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is the Founding Chair of the Dilys Trust, a charity that helps intellectually able but economically disadvantaged young people in the UK attend top class universities.

Geraint has worked in artificial intelligence, computer music, and cognitive science since 1984. He was one of the founders of the research field of computational creativity, which studies creative intelligence, and was the first in the world to hold a named professorial chair in that research area. His current work relates to cognitive architectures that explicate the relationship between perception, learning and creativity, in sequential domains, most notably language and music.

Dellacherie Delphine, Assistant / associate professor - University of Lille

Delphine Dellacherie obtained her PhD in Psychology at the University of Lille (France) under the supervision of Prof. Séverine Samson in 2009. She is an associate professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Lille since 2013. She is also a neuropsychologist in the neuropediatric unit of the CHU of Lille at the “Centre National de Référence des Maladies et anomalies congénitales du Cervelet” (CRMR Troubles du cervelet) since 2010. Her research focuses on the cerebellum and child development with a focus on music, timing and neurodevelopmental pathologies. Her research is funded by the “Fondation Maladies Rares”. https://psitec.univ-lille3.fr/presentation/membres/membres-titulaires/dellacherie-d/

Luc Nijs, Associate Professor – University of Luxembourg

Luc Nijs is Associate Professor and head of the Bachelor in Music Education at the University of Luxembourg. In addition, he is Visiting Professor at Ghent University, affiliated to IPEM (Systematic Musicology) and - as co-founder - to the Jonet Chair on Music Making and Social Action. His research integrates theory development, empirical studies and practice, focusing on the musician ‐ instrument relationship, on the role of body movement in the instrumental learning processes, and on the role of technology in provoking an embodied approach to instrumental music education. Apart from his work as a scholar, Luc is active as a musician, mainly performing with his band The Holy Seven.