Publications de Steffen Alexander Herff

Solitary silence and social sounds: music can influence mental imagery, inducing thoughts of social interactions

Steffen Alexander Herff, Gabriele Cecchetti

The COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by a marked increase in the use of music listening for self-regulation. During these challenging times, listeners reported they used music ‘to keep them company’; indicating that they may have turned to music for socia ...

2025

Hierarchical syntax model of music predicts theta power during music listening

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Steffen Alexander Herff, Gabriele Cecchetti

Linguistic research showed that the depth of syntactic embedding is reflected in brain theta power. Here, we test whether this also extends to non-linguistic stimuli, specifically music. We used a hierarchical model of musical syntax to continuously quanti ...

2024

Interpreting Rhythm as Parsing: Syntactic-Processing Operations Predict the Migration of Visual Flashes as Perceived During Listening to Musical Rhythms

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Steffen Alexander Herff, Gabriele Cecchetti

Music can be interpreted by attributing syntactic relationships to sequential musical events, and, computationally, such musical interpretation represents an analogous combinatorial task to syntactic processing in language. While this perspective has been ...

Wiley2023

Musical Garden Paths: Evidence for Syntactic Revision Beyond the Linguistic Domain

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Steffen Alexander Herff, Gabriele Cecchetti

While theoretical and empirical insights suggest that the capacity to represent and process complex syntax is crucial in language as well as other domains, it is still unclear whether specific parsing mechanisms are also shared across domains. Focusing on ...

Wiley2022

Information Processing Biases: The Effects of Negative Emotional Symptoms on Sampling Pleasant and Unpleasant Information

Steffen Alexander Herff

Although theories of emotion associate negative emotional symptoms with cognitive biases in information processing, they rarely specify the details. Here, we characterize cognitive biases in information processing of pleasant and unpleasant information, an ...

AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC2022

Hearing functional harmony in jazz: A perceptual study on music-theoretical accounts of extended tonality

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Daniel Harasim, Steffen Alexander Herff, Gabriele Cecchetti, Christoph Finkensiep

Functional harmony is an integral part of many repertoires in the Western musical practices, including both diatonic and extended tonality. In the latter context, music-theoretical accounts suggest that the three octatonic equivalence classes (OECs) consis ...

SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD2022

Expertise-Related Differences in Wrist Muscle Co-contraction in Drummers (vol 11, 1360, 2020)

Steffen Alexander Herff

Frontiers Media2021

Hierarchical syntactic structure predicts listeners’ sequence completion in music

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Daniel Harasim, Steffen Alexander Herff, Gabriele Cecchetti, Christoph Finkensiep

Studies in psycho-linguistics have provided compelling evidence that theoretical syntactic structures have cognitive correlates that inform and influence language perception. Generative grammar models also present a principled way to represent a plethora o ...

2021

The experience of musical structure as computation : what can we learn?

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Steffen Alexander Herff, Gabriele Cecchetti, Christoph Finkensiep

This paper presents an overview of the epistemological grounding of the computational approach to musical syntax as a tool to advance our understanding of the cognitive underpinnings of the musical experience. From the proposed perspective, formulations of ...

2021

Musical syntactic structure improves memory for melody: evidence from the processing of ambiguous melodies

Martin Alois Rohrmeier, Steffen Alexander Herff, Gabriele Cecchetti

Memories of most stimuli in the auditory and other domains are prone to the disruptive interference of intervening events, whereby memory performance continuously declines as the number of intervening events increases. However, melodies in a familiar music ...

2021