Bio
Rainer Polak is Associate Professor in Interdisciplinary Rhythm Research at the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion and at the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo. Prior to that, he held researcher positions at RITMO (2022–2024), MPI for Empirical Aesthetics (2017-2022), and HfMT K?ln (2011-2016). His study background is in social anthropology and African studies (MA 1996 and PhD 2002, University of Bayreuth).
At RITMO, Polak leads a research project funded by the Research Council of Norway, DjembeDance (2023–2027).
Publications
* joint first authors
Barbero, F. M., Lenc, T., Jacoby, N., Polak, R., Varlet, M., & Nozaradan, S. (2025). Revealing rhythm categorization in human brain activity. Science Advances, 11(31), eadu9838. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu9838
Polak, R. (2025). From Mali to Ghana: Pulsation Non-Isochrony in West African Percussion Music Genres. Analytical Approaches to African Music, 1(1). https://africa.iftawm.org/aaam-vol-1-iss-1/
Lenc, T., Lenoir, C., Keller, P. E., Polak, R., Mulders, D., & Nozaradan, S. (2025). Measuring self-similarity in empirical signals to understand musical beat perception. European Journal of Neuroscience, 61(2), e16637. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ejn.16637
Jacoby, N., Polak, R., Grahn, J. A., Cameron, D. J., Lee, K. M., Godoy, R., Undurraga, E. A., Huanca, T., Thalwitzer, T., Doumbia, N., Goldberg, D., Margulis, E. H., Wong, P. C. M., Jure, L., Rocamora, M., Fujii, S., Savage, P. E., Ajimi, J., Konno, R., . . . McDermott, J. H. (2024). Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries. Nature Human Behaviour.
London, J., Jacoby, N., & Polak, R. (2022). Theoretical and Practical Aspects of Cross-Cultural Corpus Studies: Two Case Studies f
