Born in Duisburg, Reuter studied musicology at the University of Cologne, received his doctorate summa cum laude in 1996 and his habilitation in 2002.
He has held guest professorships or teaching positions at several universities (University of Vienna, Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt, Weimar), and has also been a managing partner of a Cologne-based internet agency since 2000.
Examples of his manifold studies in the field of systematic musicology are investigations on sound colour perception, on the Variophon, on music automatons, on perception of unpleasant noises and on musical dice games.. Reuter is a board member of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Musikpsychologie [de] (DGM) and in 2006-2008 was the editor of the yearbook of the Society for Music Psychology.
He is a member of the board and head of the working group of the "Wissenschaft" in the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Musik und Medizin [de] (ÖGfMM).
He is also a member of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM), the Consulting Boards of Musicae Scientiae, the Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft (ÖGMW), the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung (GfM), the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Akustik (Dega), the Internationalen Arbeitskreis für systematische Musikwissenschaft (IASM) as well as the Gesellschaft für selbstspielende Musikinstrumente (GSM) Current list of publications[6]