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
Polak, R. (in press). From Mali to Ghana: Pulsation Non-Isochrony in West African Percussion Music Genres. Analytical Approaches to African Music, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14675227
Polak, Rainer, & Doumbia, Noumouké (2022). Learning to dance in rural Mali. In A. v. B. Wharton & D. Urbanavi?ien? (Eds.), Dance and Economy, Dance Transmission: Proceedings of the 31st Symposium of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) Study Group on Ethnochoreology (pp. 282–290). Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre.
Polak, Rainer (2022). Non-isochronous metre in music from Mali. In M. Doffman, E. Payne, & T. Young (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music (pp. 252–274). Oxford University Press.
Biological constraints, social learning, and cultural variation in rhythm perception and production;
Multimodality in rhythm performance and perception;
Performance and audiency beyond the concert hall.
Performance as a research method: Polak plays accompaniment in the context of apprenticing to master djembe drummer Jeli Madi Kuyate, at a name-giving celebration in Bamako (1994).
Research approach
Polak's research focuses on case studies of drumming and dance practices from West Africa, while at the same time also developing comparative perspectives on cross-cultural variation in human rhythm perception and production. This research aims at integrating approaches from the humanities and the social, computational, and cognitive sciences. Such breadth requires support and close collaboration with colleagues, including music theorist and music cognition researcher Justin London, computational scientist and cognitive scientist Nori Jacoby, (ethno)musicologist Lara Pearson, and cognitive neuroscientist Sylvie Nozaradan, among others.
Parallel to his career as a researcher, and especially during gaps in his academic career, Polak also worked as a freelancer and taught djembe drumming. Throughout his career, he has worked as closely and sustainably as possible with Malian artists. First and foremost, he learned from them due to their enormous artistic generosity. At the same time, he has endeavored to provide platforms for their artistic work in the Global North, e.g., in the form of CD productions and the repeated organization of concert and workshop tours.
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