Dr Daniel Müllensiefen

Senior lecturer in psychology (formerly Computing)
Goldsmiths College
University of London
New Cross
London SE14 6NW
United Kingdom
tel: +44 (0) 20 7919 7895
fax: +44 (0) 20 7919 7873

I studied Systematic Musicology, Historic Musicology and Journalism at the universities of Hamburg (Germany) and Salamanca (Spain). I did my doctoral dissertation in Systematic Musicology on memory for melodies under the supervision of Albrecht Schneider at the University of Hamburg and obtained my PhD in 2005. From April 2006 until June 2009 I worked as a Research Fellow in the Computing department at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Since July 2009 I have been a lecturer, and since 2012 senior lecturer, in the Psychology department at Goldsmiths and co-director of the Master's course in Music Mind and Brain at Goldsmiths. Since September 2010 I am also working as Scientist in Residence with the London-based advertising agency DDB UK.

In my non-academic work, I have been working as a freelance expert witness in music law cases for numerous music publishers and producers, record labels, law firms, and in court since 1999. In 2006, together with Marc Pendzich I founded the musikgutachten.de GbR, a consultancy for music copyright affairs which is now directed by Dr Klaus Frieler in Hamburg, Germany. From 2000 until 2006 I was a project manager and business development manager for PhonoNet GmbH, a technical subsidiary of the German Association of the Music Industry.

Since July 2009 I am working as a course co-director and lecturer on the Master's course Music Mind and Brain in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths College

From 2006 to 2009 I have been working as a Research Fellow in the Intelligent Sound and Music Systems (ISMS) group, part of the Centre for Cognition, Computation and Culture at Goldsmiths College. I was mainly working on the EPSRC supported M4S (EPSRC reference: EP/D038855/1) project, investigating human memory for melodies and melodic similarity perception. Results, publications, and software developed during that project can be found here.

Some of my current research projects include earworms, and in particular the musical structure of these tunes that stick in our heads (supported by a British Academy small grant), the development of the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI), a psychometric tool to measure the level of musical sophistication and experience in the general population on various dimensions (supported by Goldsmiths Early Career Award), and the notion of melodic similarity in the context of court cases of musical plagiarism (supported by a departmental pump priming grant).

Over the course of the M4S project I developed an open source software toolbox for melodic feature analysis called FANTASTIC implemented in R. The code can be downloaded here and the algorithms and features implemented in FANTASTIC are documented in this technical report.

Together with Klaus Frieler I developed a software for similarity computation called SIMILE which is described in this documentation. The binary for Windows is available upon request.

Journal Articles

Book Chapters

Recent Conference Papers

Recent Spoken Papers, Presentations and Seminars

Reviews

Dissertations (in German)

My work on similarity algorithms and musical plagiarism, the study with Alisun Pawley on 'singalongability' as well as the project on musicality with the BBC (the 'How Musical Are You?' test) and on earworms has received some recent coverage in the popular media.

  • 5 min podcast on audio branding and music in advertising for the Audio Branding Congress 2012 at Oxford University. Listen to it here.
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  • The singalongability of pop songs as covered by articles on Wired and NBC News. The latter one includes links to Youtube videos for the top 10 of singalongable songs.
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  • 5 min radio interview with the British station UCB on earworms. Listen to it here.
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  • Interview with LabNews UK on the singalongability of pop tunes.
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  • 3 min TV news feature on ITV London. Watch it here.
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  • 3 min interview with Hamburg radio station Alster Radio on learning and background music. Listen to it here.
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  • Extended coverage of the 'How Musical Are You?' test in the Guardian.
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  • A piece on the musiality project in the Telegraph.
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  • An hour-long discussion with two other 'eminent thinkers' on The Forum broadcast by the BBC World Service. Listen to it here.
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  • 5 min interview with Bremen's public pop station Bremen 4 (in German). Download mp3 here.
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  • A 10 min talk as part of the public engagement event Striking Your Own Chord at the London Science Museum's Dana Centre. Download mp4 here.
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  • 30 min interview with New York's public radio station WNYC. Listen to it here.
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  • 3 min TV feature on the London news site Eastlondonlines. Watch here.