The Power of Music: Ligeti Center Researchers Marry Music and Technology

A BMBF-funded collaboration in Hamburg fuses music, healthcare, and IT. Hosted at and led by one of DFN’s participating institutions, the Hamburg University of Music and Drama, the ligeti center brings together science and art as part of its mandate to transfer academic research into societal benefits. Recent projects investigate topics from how music supports healing to how networked music performance enables collaboration in new digital and physical spaces. 

March 12, 2026

Composer György Ligeti brought his passion for avant-garde music to the Hamburg University of Music and Drama (Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, or HfMT) in 1073. As one of the world’s earliest computer music enthusiasts, Ligeti served as an HfMT professor until 1989, using teaching and composing as platforms to advocate for understanding and integrating ways to use computer technology for music composition and performance.

In 2023, HfMT joined forces with the Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), the Technical University of Hamburg, and the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences to honor Ligeti, starting the ligeti center as part of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research’s (BMBF’s) “Innovative Hochschule” funding program. The center’s mission is to foster interdisciplinary research that brings together the arts, science, culture, and technology, and to provide “laboratories for innovation and generalaudience edification through the translation of ideas,” accordingto the center’s website.

“When the BMBF established this initiative, it really enabled small universities to take their research and translate that knowledge to society and culture, and that is what the ligeti center is all about,” said Prof. Georg Hajdu, HfMT professor and head of the ligeti center. “The original idea for this project was very much focused on research, and while we are still focused on research, we are also emphasizing how to translate that research into society more broadly.”

Since its inception, the center has been busy doing just that. In recent years, the ligeti center evolved and extended the ambitious Healing Soundscapes project, which aims to develop methods for creating generative music and evaluating how to create “neutral” music that can positively impact the health and stress levels of patients, medical practitioners, and visitors in hospitals. Collaborators with the ligeti center have also developed new methods for networked music performances that allow musicians to play together in networked environments. As a participating institution in the German Research Network (DFN), HfMT offers the center the infrastructural backing to bring music into new spaces – digital and physical alike.

Healing Soundscapes project uses sounds to improve well-being

Before Healing Soundscapes became a formal project, it was a small initiative that started based on conversations between HfMT and UKE professors. The desire for sounds in the operating room was first introduced to the disciplines of multimedia composition and music therapy by a surgeon’s clinical practice – an idea that soon grew to include hospital waiting areas. The goal was to create musical soundscape interventions (MSI), or site-specific, generative sound installations that improve the atmosphere of a room and, in turn, the well-being of the people present in the room.

Test listening to a composition in the UKE’s waiting area, together with patients and staff | Photo: UKE, Anja Meyer

“As a music therapist, part of my professional background is being trained in seeking out empathy with people I interact with,” said Dr. Pia Preißler, research fellow at UKE, lecturer at HfMT, and coordinator of the Healing Soundscapes project. “We are trying to understand how people emotionally perceive the atmosphere and sounds that we are creating.”

To formalize the project, the interdisciplinary researchers had to develop a common vocabulary for describing musical and emotional qualities and how to evaluate them. “We needed time to start to learn from one another and learn to understand one another,” Preißler said. “If you want to describe sounds of a performance, music therapists might start with metaphors that connect to imagination and feelings. Composers might want to start by describing the sounds, scales, or other musical qualities.”

Additionally, they needed to have the infrastructure and technology to produce unique musical performances that meaningfully improved the experiences of patients and staff alike. For this, Hajdu returned to software developed years earlier by a former colleague and mentor, Clarence Barlow. He was enamored with Barlow’s AUTOBUSK software that was written for use on old Atari computers. Hajdu ported Barlow’s software to run in the Max programming language, or the “Lingua Franca of computer music,” as he described it. Integrated into contemporary digital music production platforms – and renamed DJster – the software became the basis for the first Healing Soundscapes experiments. DJster allows composers to use a wide range of sound parameters, scales, and meters in concert with a probability-based event generator to produce music capable of expanding the common rules one might hear in a symphony hall or concert venue.

Performance in the Old Elbe Tunnel, a 246-meter tunnel that connects predestrian and non-vehicle traffic between the center of Hamburg with its docks south of the Elbe river | Photo: Janina Luckow

During an exploratory pilot phase that started in 2017, Preißler, Hajdu, and their collaborators began Healing Soundscapes in the UKE Heart Center waiting room. It began with eight studentcomposed pieces. “Initially, we let the students use whatever sonic materials they wanted to, play with whatever scales they wanted to, and let them create,” Hajdu said. As the project collab orators received feedback through surveying staff, guests, and patients, it was able to codify what it meant to create “neutral” music that could promote emotional and physical well-being while remaining so unobtrusive people could actively choose to “tune out.” They came up with a core list of features for Healing Soundscapes contributions: the pieces should demonstrate disjunction (wider spacings between notes in a scale), be aperiodic, contain sonic “richness” of individual sounds, progress at slow to medium tempos, and have low to moderate volume dynamics.

With this additional data in hand, Healing Soundscapes developed a finer rubric to use in creating peaceful, soothing music for hospitals, and the project has since branched out into more complex environments, such as the waiting area of the UKE’s emergency department and the department of radiotherapy. As the collaborators continue to refine this approach through research in mixed methods designs, the Healing Soundscapes team hopes to deliver on one of the ligeti center’s core missions in the coming years after the funding from “Innovative Hochschule” expires – forming a company and translating their innovations to society more broadly.

Strong connections: networked music performance enables new ways of collaborating across digital space

HfMT offers the ligeti center access to DFN’s X-WiN network. As Germany’s national research and education network (NREN), DFN offers participating institutions access to highspeed networks that can transfer large data sets, host virtual conferences, enable VR collaboration, and, it turns out, facilitate rehearsals for musicians playing together from a distance.

Hajdu has been involved in networked music performance – musical collaboration happening in real time over a digital network – for more than 25 years. Since his first experiments sending music data between continents in 1999, Hajdu has developed multiple software solutions for sharing scores and sounds in a networked environment. According to Hajdu, the growth of network speed and access to DFN’s X-WiN network at HfMT has been a major catalyst for networked music performance innovation at the university. “Network technology has gone far beyond what our typical demandsare for music performance and collaboration,” he said.

In 2007, he developed the quintet.net multimedia performance environment to facilitate musicians playing together using networks rather than a conductor. He also built out MaxScore as a way of sharing notation with networked musicians. Hajdu still needed to refine software that could distribute accurate scores to musicians in real time. He worked with former HfMT researcher Rama Gottfried, now Professor of Contemporary Computer Music Practice at the Zurich University of the Arts in Switzerland, who developed Drawsocket to share scores accurately in networked environments. “Rama designed this conducting system based on an earlier idea of mine we had discussed, but he went far beyond what I had imagined” Hajdu said. “Drawsocket allows us to generate and disseminate scores in real time.”

These tools allow Hajdu’s students, colleagues, and collaborators to effectively play music through the internet, but it also allows musicians to perform in unorthodox places. Using these technologies and over a kilometer of fiberoptic cables, the researchers organized a performance in Hamburg’s Old Elbe Tunnel – a 246-meter tunnel that connects pedestrian and non-vehicle traffic between the center of the city with its docks south of the Elbe River. Musicians lined up on both sides of the tunnel and read off iPads using the team’s software innovations to play scores that wouldresonate – literally and figurately – with visitors.

Through strong interdisciplinary collaborations between Hamburg’s academic institutions and a strong network connection through DFN’s X-WiN network, ligeti center staff continue to find new ways to bring the power of music – be it for healing, collaboration, or entertainment – to society.