Konstantin Semilakovs

Konstantin Semilakovs is a Professor of Piano at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna and a SHARE PhD Student at the University of St Andrews, jointly supervised by Ines Jentzsch and Jonathan Kemp. Born in Latvia and raised in Germany, he maintains an active career as a classical pianist alongside his academic roles.

His research centers on synaesthesia in classical music, specifically investigating the relationship between harmony, consonance, and color perception in the works of Alexander Scriabin and Olivier Messiaen. Key research topics include:

• Cross-modal sensory integration in musical composition
• Psychological mechanisms of color-hearing phenomena
• Visual representation of harmonic structures
• Historical analysis of Scriabin's and Messiaen's synesthetic approaches
• Concert audience engagement with multisensory experiences
• Empirical studies on color-perception consistency in music

Semilakovs develops visualizations of classical compositions to demonstrate musical synaesthesia during performances, bridging academic research with public music education. His work integrates psychological experimentation with traditional musicology to explore perceptual boundaries in auditory-visual cognition.