Postdoctoral researcher · HfM Weimar

I build tools to explore how music works

I am a computational musicologist, composer, and research software developer. My work grows out of a lifelong fascination with music, computers, and the unexpected things they can do together.

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What keeps me curious

It started with a computer—and with having fun

As a child, I was given a ZX Spectrum clone. I was amazed that one small machine could draw, calculate, run games, and even make music, however limited the sound was. Around the same time, I began learning piano and cello and discovered how much I enjoyed improvising and composing. For years, I followed that musical path meticulously and studied classical music almost exclusively.

The connection between those two worlds became clear only much later. What I have always enjoyed most is building a setup—musical, analytical, or technical—then trying it out and discovering an interaction I could not quite see before. Today that might mean turning a score into explorable data, translating a listening question into an experiment, or asking what a machine-learning model can—and cannot—understand about musical features. At heart, I do this work because I have fun doing it. Building accessible tools lets me share that experience with others.

Current appointment

Research and development at HfM Weimar

At the University of Music FRANZ LISZT Weimar, I work on research and development for CAMAT, the Computer-Assisted Music Analysis Toolbox. The DFG-funded project A Comprehensive Cloud-Based Toolbox for Sheet Music Analysis runs from September 2025 to August 2028, with Prof. Dr. Martin Pfleiderer as principal investigator. We bring MEI, Python, and Jupyter notebooks into musicological research and teaching: editing and checking encodings, connecting notation to facsimiles, extracting musical events, and exploring patterns in scores. Jupyter4NFDI makes these tools accessible through a browser.

The editorial work is part of this, too. In the CAMAT editions, we correct and review optical music recognition from the Bavarian State Library and musiconn.scoresearch, turning it into usable MEI editions and research corpora. Current work draws on Denkmäler Deutscher Tonkunst (DdT): volume I/11, Buxtehude’s instrumental works, and volumes I/29–30, Instrumentalkonzerte deutscher Meister.

For me, building analytical software and working carefully with the musical sources belong together. Preserving a source as a scan keeps its visual form accessible; a musical encoding opens other ways of reading, examining, and analysing it. But that translation involves choices: what do we preserve, what do we leave out, and how much encoded information do we need to understand music? I see this as a meeting point between historical and systematic musicology: the questions we ask shape what we encode, but the source should not disappear behind the data.

Today, I often encounter a source through a scan rather than a printed volume I can hold, touch, and feel. That distance makes a carefully prepared encoding, explicitly linked back to the facsimile, feel like the least we can do to treat the source with respect. It should offer another way into the source, not replace it or conceal the editorial choices made along the way. Whatever information we choose to encode, it should remain possible to return to the source and question that reading.

How I got here

A path through different ideas of music

This was not a neat progression in which one discipline simply led to the next. Encounters with different kinds of music, years of working between them, and a difficult period of doubt all changed the direction of my work.

01 The classical path
Piano, cello, improvisation, and composition led me from childhood curiosity to formal studies. For years, I treated the classical tradition as the centre of my musical world.
02 Beyond the academy
Love Parade in 2002 and several open-air festivals in 2003–04 profoundly changed that view. Techno, drum and bass, dub, and other forms of popular electronic music made me question the idea of one “true” music.
03 Programming music
From around 2008–09, Max/MSP, OpenMusic, Pure Data, and related environments became central to how I worked. I built real-time audio systems, Max for Live devices, and analysis–synthesis setups for composition, performance, and teaching.
04 Between worlds
For years I composed contemporary concert music and minimal/techdub in parallel. Alongside my own music, I mastered the Ornithopter Records catalogue and releases by friends, and worked with Fabian Russ on concert and recording projects. The outbreak of war in my home region of Donbas, Ukraine, in 2014 became a persistent source of worry and reflection, deepening my doubts about composition as my only path even as I kept producing and performing with others.
05 From real time to research
My doctorate led me from accessible software and hybrid analysis systems towards MIR and computational musicology. As my focus moved away from real-time audio around 2020, Python gradually replaced patching environments; CAMAT in 2021–22 brought these threads together in open analytical tools and, later, machine learning.

Working principles

Open tools, reproducible music

I do not think access to music or musical analysis should depend on proprietary software or expensive hardware. Accessibility is a design requirement in my work: I release my tools as open source and keep their methods, assumptions, and workflows inspectable, reproducible, and adaptable.

Reproducibility also concerns the medium itself. I want people to be able to experience or study music with whatever is available: a sophisticated studio system, inexpensive headphones, a small loudspeaker, or even a visual or analytical representation. Music organises time; sound is one way of encountering that organisation, but not the only one.

Open research software

Selected projects

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Selected activity

Recent highlights

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2026 — Accepted workshop, Computergestützte Musikanalyse in der Cloud, GfM annual conference, Frankfurt am Main
2026 — Presented poster, CAMAT_v2: Cloud-Based Tools for Collaborative Music Score Analysis, ICCCM26, Würzburg
2026 — Presented Beyond the Black Box…, InMusic26, Aalborg
2026 — Two chapters published in Routledge Innovation in Music volumes

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Contact

Research, teaching, and collaboration

For professional enquiries, the most direct route is email.

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