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

• Pawley, A., & Müllensiefen, D. (2012). The Science of Singing Along: A Quantitative Field Study on Sing-along Behavior in the North of England. Music Perception, 30(2), 129-146.
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• Omigie, D., Müllensiefen, D., & Stewart, L. (2012). The experience of music in congenital amusia. Music Perception, 30(1), 1-18.
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• Ewert, S., Müller, M., Konz, V., Müllensiefen, D. & Wiggins, G. (2012). Towards Cross-Domain Harmonic Analysis of Music Data. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 14(3), 770-782.
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• Cason, R.J.S., & Müllensiefen, D., (2012). Singing from the same sheet: computational melodic similarity measurement and copyright law. International Review of Law, Computers & Technology, 26(1),25-36.
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• Williamson, V., Jilka, S., Fry, J., Finkel, S., Müllensiefen, D., Stewart, L. (2012). How do 'earworms' start? Classifying the everyday circumstances of Involuntary Musical Imagery. Psychology of Music, 40(3), 259-284..
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• Pearce, M. T., Müllensiefen, D., & Wiggins, G. A. (2010). The role of expectation and probabilistic reasoning in auditory boundary perception: A model comparison. Perception 39(10), 1367-1391.
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• Wiggins, G. A., Müllensiefen, D., & Pearce, M. T. (2010). On the non-existence of music: Why music theory is a figment of the imagination. Musicae Scientiae, Discussion Forum 5, 231-255.
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• Hennig, C., Müllensiefen, D., and Bargmann, J. (2010). With-in subject comparison of changes in a pretest-posttest design. Applied Psychological Measurement, 34(5), 291-309.
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• Müllensiefen, D., Pfleiderer, M., and Frieler, K. (2009). The perception of accents in pop music melodies. Journal of New Music Research, 38(1), 19-44.
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• Müllensiefen, D., and Pendzich, M. (2009). Court decisions on music plagiarism and the predictive value of similarity algorithms. Musicae Scientiae, Discussion Forum 4B, 257-295.
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• Halpern, A., and Müllensiefen, D. (2008). Effects of timbre and tempo change on memory for music. Quaterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 61(9), 1371-1384.
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• Weihs, C., Ligges, U., Mörchen, and Müllensiefen, D. (2008). Classification in Music Research. Advances in Data Analysis and Classification 1(3), 255-291.
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• Müllensiefen, D., and Frieler, K. (2007). Modelling expert's notions of melodic similarity. Musicae Scientiae, Discussion Forum 4A, 183-210.
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• Müllensiefen, D., and Frieler, K. (2004). Cognitive Adequacy in the Measurement of Melodic Similarity: Algorithmic vs. Human Judgments. Computing in Musicology, 13, 147-176.

Book Chapters

• Müllensiefen, D, and Wiggins, G. (2011). Polynomial functions as a representation of melodic phrase contour. In A. Schneider & A. von Ruschkowski (Eds.), Systematic Musicology: Empirical and Theoretcial Studies (pp. 63-88). Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang.
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• Müllensiefen, D. & Wiggins, G. (2011). Sloboda & Parker's recall paradigm for melodic memory: a new computational perspective. In I. Deliege & J. Davidson (Eds.), Music and the Mind: Essays in Honour of John Sloboda (pp. 161-188). Oxford: University Press.
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• Pearce, M. T., Müllensiefen, D., & Wiggins, G. A. (2010). Melodic Grouping in Music Information Retrieval: New Methods and Applications. In: R. Zbigniew & A. Wieczorkowska (Eds.). Advances in Music Information Retrieval. Studies in Computational Intelligence, Vol. 274 (pp. 365-390). Berlin: Springer.
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• Müllensiefen, D (2009). Statistical techniques in music psychology: An update. In: R. Bader, C. Neuhaus, C. Morgenstern (eds.), Concepts, Experiments, and Fieldwork: Studies in Systematic Musicology (pp. 193-215). Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang.
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• Wiggins, G. A., Pearce M. T., and Müllensiefen, D. (2009). Computational Modelling of Music Cognition and Musical Creativity. In R. Dean (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music (pp. 383-420). Oxford: University Press.
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• Müllensiefen, D, Wiggins, G., and Lewis, D.(2008). High-level feature descriptors and corpus-based musicology: Techniques for modelling music cognition. In A. Schneider (Ed.), Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, 24 (pp. 133-155). Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Recent Conference Papers

• Williamson, V. & Müllensiefen, D. (2012). Earworms from three angles. Presentation given at the 12th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC), 26th of July, Thessaloniki. Full paper.
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• Floridou, G., Williamson, V. & Müllensiefen, D. (2012). Contracting Earworms: The Roles of Personality and Musicality. Poster presented at the 12th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC), 27th of July, Thessaloniki.
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• Musil, J., El-Nusairi, B., and Müllensiefen, D. (2012). Perceptual dimensions of short audio clips and corresponding timbre features. In Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Computer Music Modelling and Retrieval (CMMR 2012), (pp. 311-318). Queen Mary University of London. Full paper.
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• Müllensiefen, D. and Halpern, A.R. (2011). What's behind hits and false alarms in musical memory? Poster presented at the 4th Conference on the Neurosciences and Music, Edinburgh, 9.-12. of June 2011.
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• Rhodes, C., Lewis, D., and Müllensiefen, D. (2009). Bayesian Model Selection for Harmonic Labelling. In T. Klouche and Th. Noll (Eds.), Mathematics and Computation in Music: First International Conference, MCM 2007, Berlin, Germany, May 18-20, 2007. Revised Selected Papers (Communications in Computer and Information Science). Berlin: Springer, 107-116.
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• Ewert. S, Müller, M., Müllensiefen, D., Clausen, M., and Wiggins, G. (2009). Case Study "Beatles Songs" - What can be Learned from Unreliable Music Alignments? In Proceedings of the Dagtsuhl Seminar representation of Musical Knowledge.
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• Pearce, M. T., Müllensiefen, D., & Wiggins, G. A. (2008). A comparison of statistical and rule-based models of melodic segmentation. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, (pp. 89-94). Philadelphia, USA: Drexel University. Full paper
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• Mauch, M., Müllensiefen, D, Dixon, S. and Wiggins, G. (2008). What's a Word in Harmony? Paper given at 10th International Conference for Music Perception and Cognition, Hokaido University, Sapporo, 25-30th of August 2008. Full paper
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• Lothwesen, K. & Müllensiefen, D. (2007). What makes the difference? Popmusic stars and TV talent show contestants in young people's judgements. In: K. Kallioniemi, J. Mäkelä, & H. Salmi (Eds.). History of Stardom reconsidered: The refereed proceedings of the inaugural conference of IIPC, University of Turku, 9-11.11.2006, eBook, pp. 158-165.
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• Allan, H., Müllensiefen, D., & Wiggins, G. A. (2007). Methodical Considerations in Studies of Musical Similarities. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, (pp. 473-478), Vienna.
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• Müllensiefen, D., Lewis, D., Rhodes, C. and Wiggins, G. A. (2007). Evaluating a Chord Labeling Algorithm. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, (pp. 317-318), Vienna.
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• Müllensiefen, D. and Frieler, K. (2006). Evaluating different approaches to measuring the similarity of melodies. In: Batagelj, V., Bock, H.-H., Ferligoj, A., Ziberna, A. (Eds.). Data Science and Classification. Berlin: Springer, pp. 299-306.
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• Müllensiefen, Daniel and Hennig, C. (2006). Modeling memory for melodies. In: Myra Siliopoulou, Rudolf Kruse, Christian Borgelt, Andreas Nürnberger, Wolfgang Gaul (Eds.). From Data and Information Analysis to Knowledge Engineering. Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft für Klassifikation e.V., 2005. Berlin: Springer, pp. 732-739.
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Recent Spoken Papers, Presentations and Seminars

• Müllensiefen, D., Davies, C., Dossman, L., Hansen, J.L., Pickering, A. (2012). Implicit and Explicit Effects of Music on Brand Perception in TV ads. Presentation given at the Audio Branding Congress 2012, 11th of December, University of Oxford.
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• Müllensiefen, D., & Cason, R. (2012). Singing from the same sheet: A new approach to measuring tune similarity and its legal implications. Invited speaker seminar, 5th of December, School of Law, University of Greenwich.
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• Müllensiefen, D. (2012). Measuring the Facets of Musicality: The Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index. Presentation given at the 40th Anniversary Conference of the Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research (SEMPRE), 15th of September, London.
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• Müllensiefen, D., Gingras, B., Musil, J. & Stewart, L. (2012). A new tool for measuring musical sophistication: The Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index. Presentation given at the 12th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC), 25th of July, Thessaloniki.
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• Pawley, A. & Müllensiefen, D. (2012). An empirical field study on sing-along behaviour in the North of England. Presentation given at the 12th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC), 27th of July, Thessaloniki.
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• Müllensiefen, D. (2011). A Psychological Perspective on Similarity and Distance Measures. Invited talk given at the Symposium of The German Classification Society (GfKl), 1st of September 2011, University of Frankfurt.
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• Pawley, A., & Müllensiefen, D. (2011). An empirical field study on sing-along behaviour in the North of England. Presentation given at the 7th International Conference on Music Since 1900, 30th of July 2011, University of Lancaster.
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• Stewart, L., Müllensiefen, D., & Musil, J. (2011). A new approach for understanding musicality. Presentation given at the Newcastle Science Fest, 13th of March 2011.
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• Finkel, S. and Müllensiefen, D. (2010). Involuntary Musical Imagery - Investigating Musical Features that Predict ‘Earworms’. Talk given at the Third International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus10), University of Cambridge, 14th of September, 2010.
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• Müllensiefen, D., Stewart, L., and Cooper, A. (2010). Predicting item difficulty in a melodic discrimination task using item response theory and computational structure analysis . Talk given at the Manchester meeting of the Experimental Psychology Society (EPS), University of Manchester, 7th of July, 2010.
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• Müllensiefen, D. (2010). Similarity Algorithms for Music Plagiarism . Invited talk given at the 4th International Plagiarism Conference, University of Newcastle, 22nd of June, 2010.
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• Müllensiefen, D. (2010). Can you predict how courts decide in plagiarism cases? . Talk given at the public event Striking Your Own Chord: Journeys into Musical Plagiarism, at the The Science Museum's Dana Centre.
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• Stewart, L. and Müllensiefen, D. (2010). Music and the Mind . Talk given at the London Science Museum Lates event on the Science of Music.
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• Müllensiefen, and Wiggins, G. (2009). FANTASTIC: A Feature Analysis Toolbox for corpus-based cognitive research on the perception of popular music. Paper given at the ISMS seminars, Goldsmiths, University of London, and paper at the 21st Annual Meeting of the German Society for Music Psychology (DGM), University of Kassel, Germany.
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• Müllensiefen, D., Bonometti, M., Stewart, L., and Wiggins, G. (2009). Testing Different Models of Melodic Contour. 7th Triennial Conference of the European Society of the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM 2009), University of Jyäskylä, Finalnd.
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• Müllensiefen, D. (2009). Using R for data analysis. Skills Session given as part of Goldsmiths' staff training, August 2009, Goldsmiths, University of London.
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• Pendzich, M. and Müllensiefen, D. (2009). Court Decisions on Music Plagiarism and the Predictive Value of Similarity Algorithms. 7th Triennial Conference of the European Society of the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM 2009), University of Jyäskylä, Finalnd.
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• Müllensiefen, D. (2009). Statistical techniques in music psychology: An update. Workshop given at the IPEM Think-tank, University of Ghent, Belgium.
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• Müllensiefen, D., and Wiggins, G. A. (2009). Sloboda`s & Parker`s recall paradigm for melodic memory: A new computational persepctive. Talk at the Symposium Music and Cognition: Around the Contribution of John Sloboda, IRCAM, 2009.
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• Halpern, A.R., Müllensiefen, D, and Wiggins, G. (2008). Modelling Memory Responses in a Memory Recognition Task. Paper given at 10th International Conference for Music Perception and Cognition, Hokaido University, Sapporo, 25-30th of August 2008.
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• Pearce, M., Müllensiefen, D, and Wiggins, G. (2008). Perceptual Segmentation of Melodies: Ambiguity, Rules, and Statistical Learning. Paper given at 10th International Conference for Music Perception and Cognition, Hokaido University, Sapporo, 25-30th of August 2008.
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• Müllensiefen, D, and Wiggins, G. (2008). Representing Melodic Contour by Polynomials. Paper given at 10th International Conference for Music Perception and Cognition, Hokaido University, Sapporo, 25-30th of August 2008.
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• Müllensiefen D. (2008). Dealing with ambiguity in empirical models of music cognition. Talk at the Music and Brain Club, Wellcome Centre, University College, London.
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• Pearce, M. T., Wiggins, G. A. and Müllensiefen D. (2008). Statistical Models of Music Cognition. Invited talk at the symposium Around Fred Lerdahl & Ray Jackendoff's Generative Theory of Tonal Music. IRCAM, Paris. January 2008.
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• Müllensiefen D., Pearce, M. T., Wiggins, G. A. and Frieler, K. (2007). Segmenting pop melodies: A model comparison approach. Presented at the Conference for the Society for Music Perception and Cognition. Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. August 2007.
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• Müllensiefen D., Lewis, D., and Wiggins, G. A. (2007). Feature description and corpus-based musicology: Tools for modelling music cognition. Paper at the Conference of International Musicological Society (IMS), University of Zürich.
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• Müllensiefen D., Lewis, D., and Wiggins, G. A. (2007). Where`s the chorus? A computational approach for the automatic segemntation of pop songs. Paper at the Conference of International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), Mexico City.

Reviews

• Stewart,L. and Müllensiefen, (2010). MSc in Music, Mind and Brain at Goldsmiths, University of London. In Psychomusicology, 20(1-2), 177-179.
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• Pearce, M. T. and Müllensiefen, (2008). David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006, 512 pp., ISBN 0262083450, (Hardcover). In Musicae Scientiae, 12(1), 158-168.
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• Pearce, M. T., Müllensiefen, D., Lewis, D. and Rhodes, C. S. (2007). David Temperley, Music and Probability. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007, ISBN-13: 978-0-262-20166-7 (hardcover) $40.00. In Empirical Musicology Review, 2(4), 155-163.
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Dissertations (in German)

• Müllensiefen, D. (2004). Variabilität and Konstanz von Melodien in der Erinnerung: ein Beitrag zur musikpsychologischen Gedächtnisforschung . Doctoral Dissertation, Institute of Musicology, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.
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• Müllensiefen, D. (1999). Gedächtnisleistungen bei Hintergrundmusik. Masters Dissertation, Institute of Musicology, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.

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.