Mats Küssner

Mats Küssner is a Researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin's Department of Musicology, specializing in Transcultural Musicology and Historical Anthropology of Music. Previously, he held a Peter Sowerby Research Associate position at the Royal College of Music in London. He earned his doctorate from King's College London, focusing on cross-modal mappings between sound and visual forms. His work bridges music psychology, cognitive science, and cultural studies, emphasizing how music shapes human thought and emotion through multi-method approaches.

Research interests include multimodal perception, music-induced mental imagery, 4E cognition (embodied/embedded/enactive/extended), and performance science. Notable awards include the Aubrey Hickman Award for music psychology research and a teaching excellence award. He teaches courses like 'Diversity in Berlin's Sound Scene' and 'Emotions in Music' at both BA and MA levels.

His publications span over 40 peer-reviewed articles across journals like Music & Science, Psychomusicology, and Frontiers in Psychology, with a focus on visual-aural interplay, music cognition disorders (e.g., aphantasia), and cross-cultural performance dynamics. He co-edited the landmark volume Music and Mental Imagery (Routledge, 2022). Recent work explores environmental ecomusicology education and music's role in mitigating social isolation.

Küssner leads projects on music-induced emotion prediction using cross-modal correspondences and is part of Berlin's interdisciplinary music psychology scene, collaborating with neuroscientists and cultural anthropologists. His lab employs eye-tracking, EEG, and behavioral experiments to study embodied music cognition processes.