Seung-Goo Kim

Seung-Goo [IPA:sɯŋgu] KIM (김승구;金勝九) is a cognitive neuroscientist specialized in human neuroimaging and auditory processing. Seung-Goo uses computational models of sounds and non-invasive human neuroimaging techniques (functional/structural MRI and M/EEG source imaging) to investigate (1) how the musical sounds are represented in the human brain and (2) how these neural representations are transformed to evoke intense emotions.

After a Ph.D. program at Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany in 2017 (PI: Dr. Thomas R. Knösche), he has worked as a postdoc at Duke University (PI: Dr. Tobias Overath), and currently works as a research scientist at Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (PI: Dr. Daniela Sammler).

news

Oct 15, 2026	I didn’t even know that the GisCus commenting was not working! I still think that no one else has ever tried it before, but Claude made a fix, GitHub Copilot tested and confirmed the fix so that giscus bot can send me notifications! 🤖🤖🤖 The Future Is Wow.
Jul 30, 2026	Mr. Augustin Bouquillard (Ingénieur Polytechnicien Program at École Polytechnique; doing two masters in CS and applied math in 4 years in a Napoleon-like fancy uniform🧑🏻‍✈️) has successfully completed his 4-month internship in our group, co-supervised by me, Dr. Daniela Sammler (group leader), and Dr. Stefan Lattner (Sony CSL Paris)! During his internship, he worked on the Benchmark Suite of Musical Expectation (MEX🌶️; accepted at ISMIR-2026) and a series of behavioural validation experiments of the autoregressive diffusion model that estimates Shannon entropy and surprisal directly from music audio data. We will keep working on this topic together in the future, and we are looking forward to publishing our results soon!
Jun 23, 2026	The interdisciplinary workshop on Affective Voice Perception and Synthesis (AVoPS) successfully took place at the MPIEA, Frankfurt am Main. Dr. Tirza Biron from Weizmann Institute of Science,Prof. Juhan Nam, Prof. Jieun Song, and their students from KAIST, South Korea, joined us for a week of exciting discussions and collaborations.
Jun 17, 2026	Our OHBM symposium on “Sound and Music: Naturalistic Approaches to Auditory–Motor and Affective Brain Dynamics” was a great success! We appreciate all speakers and attendees for their contributions to the symposium.
Apr 16, 2026	We’ve got the first complete EEG+ dataset for one subject as of today! 🎉 Stay tuned for more!

latest posts

Oct 15, 2026	singularity—the future is wow ✨
Aug 25, 2026	Do we need to know about the brain 🧠 to understand musical emotion? 🧑‍🎤
Feb 27, 2026	Grossly Over-Optimising (GOO) algorithm 🤖

selected publications

preprint

Temporal Structure Perception in Tonal and Atonal Music: An Online Behavioural Study

Seung-Goo Kim, Daniel Müllensiefen, Ying Yu, and 1 more author

PsyArXiv, 2026

DOI HTML PDF

ManyMusic: An Open-access Music Audio Dataset for Human Experiments on Musical Emotions

Seung-Goo Kim, Pablo Alonso-Jiménez, Till Bechtloff, and 2 more authors

Proceedings – 3rd Workshop on Human-Centric Music Information Research (HCMIR25), Daejeon, Republic of Korea, 20 September 2025, Sep 2025

DOI Bib PDF

@article{kim2025mms,
  author = {Kim, Seung-Goo and Alonso-Jiménez, Pablo and Bechtloff, Till and Sammler, Daniela and Bogdanov, Dmitry},
  title = {ManyMusic: An Open-access Music Audio Dataset for Human Experiments on Musical Emotions},
  journal = {Proceedings -- 3rd Workshop on Human-Centric Music Information Research (HCMIR25), Daejeon, Republic of Korea, 20 September 2025},
  month = sep,
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.17346525},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17346525},
}

preprint

Stimulus-Driven Leakage in Naturalistic Neuroimaging

Seung-Goo Kim

bioRxiv, Sep 2025

DOI Bib HTML PDF

@article{kim2025rdd,
  author = {Kim, Seung-Goo},
  doi = {10.1101/2025.04.01.646146},
  elocation-id = {2025.04.01.646146},
  eprint = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2025/04/05/2025.04.01.646146v2.full.pdf},
  journal = {bioRxiv},
  publisher = {Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory},
  title = {Stimulus-Driven Leakage in Naturalistic Neuroimaging},
  year = {2025},
}

CerCor

Linguistic modulation of the neural encoding of phonemes

Seung-Goo Kim, Federico De Martino, and Tobias Overath

Cerebral Cortex, Sep 2024

DOI Bib HTML PDF Code

@article{kim2024cc,
  journal = {Cerebral Cortex},
  author = {Kim, Seung-Goo and Martino, Federico De and Overath, Tobias},
  date-modified = {2024-04-25 14:43:05 +0200},
  doi = {10.1093/cercor/bhae155},
  title = {Linguistic modulation of the neural encoding of phonemes},
  year = {2024},
}

FNsci
On the encoding of natural music in computational models and human brains

Seung-Goo Kim

Frontiers in Neuroscience, Sep 2022

Abs DOI Bib HTML PDF

This article discusses recent developments and advances in the neuroscience of music to understand the nature of musical emotion. In particular, it highlights how system identification techniques and computational models of music have advanced our understanding of how the human brain processes the textures and structures of music and how the processed information evokes emotions. Musical models relate physical properties of stimuli to internal representations called features, and predictive models relate features to neural or behavioral responses and test their predictions against independent unseen data. The new frameworks do not require orthogonalized stimuli in controlled experiments to establish reproducible knowledge, which has opened up a new wave of naturalistic neuroscience. The current review focuses on how this trend has transformed the domain of the neuroscience of music.
@article{kim2022fn, author = {Kim, Seung-Goo}, doi = {10.3389/fnins.2022.928841}, issn = {1662-453X}, journal = {Frontiers in Neuroscience}, title = {On the encoding of natural music in computational models and human brains}, volume = {16}, year = {2022}, bdsk-url-1 = {https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2022.928841}, bdsk-url-2 = {https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2022.928841} }