Works of art have the power to touch people. As a result, arts such as literature, film, painting, dance, and opera are one of the key areas of research within the Languages of Emotion cluster, a research alliance funded as part of the Excellence Initiative jointly sponsored by the German federal government and the governments of the individual federal states.

The awards just keep rolling in: At the start of April, Christian Hackenberger received the Karl Winnacker Instructor’s Fellowship for exceptional academic achievement. The German Chemical Society (GDCh) had just recently granted him the ADUC annual award for candidates completing the habilitation process. And on May 9, the 34-year-old Hackenberger is to receive the 16,000-euro Heinz Maier Leibnitz Prize from the German Research Foundation (DFG), considered the most important award in Germany for the next generation of scholars and scientists.

Going to the movies just isn’t complete without sound, and that connection between images and sound was an important one even during the earliest days of film as a medium. In the Department of Music Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, researchers led by Professor Albrecht Riethmüller are studying the history of film music in Germany as part of the German Film Music Project.