Mats Küssner
PhD Student
Email mats.kussner@kcl.ac.uk
Music Department
King's College London
Strand Campus
London
WC2R 2LS
Thesis Title
Shaping Music in Performance
Supervisor
Daniel Leech-Wilkinson
Research
'Shaping Music in Performance' is a King's based research project and
part of the nationwide, AHRC-funded, Centre for Musical Performance as
Creative Practice (CMPCP). Its aims are to shed light on the notion of
'shape' or 'shaping' as used by performers, listeners, critics, composers
and music scholars in a variety of ways. Mats' particular role within this
project is to clarify and investigate performers' and listeners' sense of
shape in more detail, and for this purpose he aims to conduct psychological
experiments designed to tease out the relations between elements of musical
sound and our perceptions and visualizations of them.
For further information, or to take part in a study, please send Mats an
email at mats.kussner@kcl.ac.uk or visit the CMPCP website
at http://www.cmpcp.ac.uk/smip.html.
Educational and Professional Background
Mats studied undergraduate psychology at the universities of Würzburg and
Amsterdam from 2005 to 2008, before graduating from Goldsmiths in 2009 with a Master's in Music, Mind and Brain (www.gold.ac.uk/pg/msc-music-mind-brain). Equipped with a strong background in experimental psychology, he has run neurocognitive studies investigating the role of background music in vocabulary learning (under the supervision of Annette de Groot, in Amsterdam) and the neural correlates of music-induced emotions (under the supervision of Stefan Koelsch, in Berlin).
On completing his Master's, Mats went on to read music at postgraduate level
and gained teaching experience at Goldsmiths before being offered a fully
funded PhD position at King's College, London - which he took up in June
2010.