About

I have been a doctoral researcher in the Music Perception Lab since 2022. My research focuses on timbre perception, acoustical signal processing, and psychoacoustics. I am currently investigating how our auditory system can hear out and identify individual instruments in complex musical mixtures and how these abilities are affected by room-acoustical parameters such as the spatial distribution of sound sources and reverberation in a concert hall. In addition to my main research in the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1330 Hearing Acoustics (HAPPAA), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), I was involved in other interdisciplinary projects like the Golden Ear Challenge and the ACTOR Project. I studied Engineering Physics at Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. During my bachelor’s thesis (B.Eng.), I worked in the former Speech Processing and Perception Modelling group led by Dr. Marc René Schädler, investigating comb filter effects with a commodity-hardware prototype hearing aid. I then joined Kai Siedenburg’s Lab in 2020 for my master’s thesis (M.Sc.) to model and perceptually evaluate spectral envelopes of musical instrument sounds. I am currently in my fourth year as a doctoral researcher. While my academic career has been mainly scientifically driven, I combine my interests in physics with a great passion for music. I play the trombone in several jazz ensembles, conduct a small classical orchestra, and write arrangements from time to time while sitting at the piano.  

Research interests

• Timbre perception
• Musical instrument perception
• Psychoacoustics

Education

• M.Sc. in Engineering Physics, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Jul 2022
• B.Eng. in Engineering Physics, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Dec 2019

Publications

• Jacobsen, S., Baril, F., Grimm, G. & Siedenburg, K. (2025). Investigating instrument identification in a virtual orchestral scene. Zenodo. https://doi.org//10.5281/zenodo.17208001 [Music Perception preprint]
• Jacobsen, S. & Siedenburg, K. (2024). Exploring the relation between fundamental frequency and spectral envelope in the perception of musical instrument sounds. Acta Acustica, 48(8). https://doi.org/10.1051/aacus/2024038.
• Bürgel, M., Mencke, I., Benjamin, A., Dechert, M., Derks, D., Gerdes, K., Hake, R., Jacobsen, S. & Siedenburg, K. (2023). Unifying concert research and science outreach. Musicae Scientiae, 28(1), 187–191. https://doi.org/10.1177/10298649231182078. 

• Siedenburg, K., Jacobsen, S., & Reuter, C. (2021). Spectral envelope position and shape in sustained musical instrument sounds. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 149(6), 3715–3727. doi.org/10.1121/10.0005088.