Publications by Steffen Alexander Herff

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

Gabriele Cecchetti, Steffen Alexander Herff

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, Gabriele Cecchetti, Steffen Alexander Herff

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, Gabriele Cecchetti, Steffen Alexander Herff

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, Gabriele Cecchetti, Steffen Alexander Herff

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, Christoph Finkensiep, Daniel Harasim, Gabriele Cecchetti, Steffen Alexander Herff

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, Christoph Finkensiep, Daniel Harasim, Gabriele Cecchetti, Steffen Alexander Herff

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, Christoph Finkensiep, Gabriele Cecchetti, Steffen Alexander Herff

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, Gabriele Cecchetti, Steffen Alexander Herff

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

The influence of anodal transcranial direct current stimulation over the right auditory cortex on interference effects in memory for melodies

Steffen Alexander Herff

The study investigates how transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the auditory cortex (AC) modulates memory for melodies under different noise conditions, whilst also considering cumulative disruptive interference effects. Forty-one participan ...

ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE2021

The effect of low-frequency equalisation on preference and sensorimotor synchronisation in music

Steffen Alexander Herff

Equalisation, a signal processing technique commonly used to shape the sound of music, is defined as the adjustment of the energy in specific frequency components of a signal. In this work, we investigate the effects of equalisation on preference and senso ...

SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD2021

Music influences vividness and content of imagined journeys in a directed visual imagery task

Gabriele Cecchetti, Steffen Alexander Herff, Ken Jacques Alfonso Deguernel

Directed, intentional imagination is pivotal for self-regulation in the form of escapism and therapies for a wide variety of mental health conditions, such anxiety and stress disorders, as well as phobias. Clinical application in particular benefits from i ...

Nature Portfolio2021

Expertise-Related Differences in Wrist Muscle Co-contraction in Drummers

Steffen Alexander Herff

Background and Aim:Drumming requires excellent motor control and temporal coordination. Deploying specific muscle activation patterns may help achieve these requirements. Muscle activation patterns that involve reciprocal contraction of antagonist muscles ...

Frontiers Media2020

Prefrontal High Gamma in ECoG Tags Periodicity of Musical Rhythms in Perception and Imagination

Steffen Alexander Herff

Rhythmic auditory stimuli are known to elicit matching activity patterns in neural populations. Furthermore, recent research has established the particular importance of high-gamma brain activity in auditory processing by showing its involvement in auditor ...

2020

The perceptual relevance of balance, evenness, and entropy in musical rhythms

Steffen Alexander Herff

There is an uncountable number of different ways of characterizing almost any given real-world stimulus. This necessitates finding stimulus features that are perceptually relevant - that is, they have distinct and independent effects on the perception and ...

ELSEVIER2020

Age-Dependent Statistical Learning Trajectories Reveal Differences in Information Weighting

Steffen Alexander Herff

Statistical learning (SL) is the ability to generate predictions based on probabilistic dependencies in the environment, an ability that is present throughout life. The effect of aging on SL is still unclear. Here, we explore statistical learning in health ...

AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC2020