Hoeffding, Simon

I am a Cesar Nombela Researcher at UAM and affiliated researcher at the “RITMO center for Rhythm, Time, and Motion” at the University of Oslo. I hold a PhD in Philosophy (2015) from the “Center for Subjectivity Research”, University of Copenhagen.

At UAM, I’ll teach Philosophy of mind and related topics at BA and MA levels

 I am probably most famous for my work with The Danish String Quartet, currently one of the world’s most successfull chamber ensembles, for whom I’ve served as the “house philosopher” for more than ten years. I am trained in liberal arts, buddhist philosophy, philosophy of mind, and phenomenology from Soka University of America, University of Liverpool and University of Copenhagen. Trying to understand the experience of “losing onself” in music, I began my PhD with Dan Zahavi in classical phenomenology, but soon branched out to involve etnographic, qualitative methods, formulating a methodological framework called “The Phenomenological Interview”. I also try to understand the experience shared absorption between musicians and audiences and have with large research teams of psychologists, engineers, and musicologists, taken my research into concert halls, measuring, interviewing, and analyzing this experience both qualitatively, but also quantitatively in terms of shared patterns of breathing, movement, and heart rate variability synchronization. With this background, I’ll now try to understand what role shared musical absorption has in recevory processes in music therapy.

I’ve published numerous articles, chapters, data-sets, and documentaries, and staged various concerts related to my research. Beyond articles in journals such as Topoi, Mind & Language, Synthese and Cognitive Systems Research, I’ve edited special collections and issues on the “self”, “phenomenological interview methods”, “concert research”, and “music, mind and mental health” in journals such as Journal of Consciousness Studies, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, and Music & Science. I’ve co-edited Philosophy of Improvisation on Routledge and published the monograph A Phenomenology of Musical Absorption with Palgrave.