Kai Siedenburg

Prof. Dr Kai Siedenburg has been appointed as Professor of Systematic Musicology at the Institute of Music as part of a “Lower Saxony Impulse Professorship.” He will receive a total of around €2.2 million in funding from the Volkswagen Foundation for his research over a period of five years. The professorship will then be made permanent. Siedenburg previously conducted research as Professor of Communication Acoustics at Graz University of Technology (Austria).

He studied mathematics and musicology at Humboldt University in Berlin and the University of California, Berkeley (USA). He then earned his doctorate in music technology at McGill University in Montréal (Canada). In 2015, Siedenburg joined the University of Oldenburg as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow. Starting in 2020, the Volkswagen Foundation supported his research on music perception with a Freigeist Fellowship. 

Siedenburg focuses on the perception of music, particularly with regards to hearing impairments. As part of the five-year funding period, he is investigating new approaches to perceiving music. These include technical solutions that enable a personalized music mix in real time—for example, via headphones at a concert. He is also investigating ways of perceiving additional sound details through the skin.
Siedenburg's research has received several awards: in 2020, he received the Lothar Cremer Prize from the German Acoustical Society, and in 2022, he was accepted into the Young Academy. In 2025, he received the Early Career Award from the International Commission on Acoustics.