Rainer Polak
Biographic Data
| ID | 930850 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rainer Polak |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rainer |
| FAMILY NAME | Polak |
| SIGNATURE | POLAK R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oslo |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5684-1499 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Round Table: Audiency beyond the Concert Hall: Theory and Ethnographic Case Studies
In recent years, the neologism audiency has found traction as a direct counterpart to the term performance , not least among theatre and performance scholars. 1 It announces audience research that is inclined to understand phenomena of witnessing as action and as involved in processes that stand in a mutually constitutive relationship with performance. This contrasts with the more familiar focus on groups of people (‘audiences’) and their constit…
Performance in the Round: Embedded Audiency at Music–Dance Events in Mali
In many West African dance-drumming genres, the emphasis is on involving the gathered community in the performance, inviting them to take turns dancing. In such performance contexts, there is no audience in the strict sense, no group of participants who are not themselves directly involved as performers. Based on ethnographic case studies of music–dance events in rural southern Mali, this article argues for the concept of embedded audiency, showi…
Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries
Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries, spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random ‘seed’ rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of ‘telephone’), such that their biases (the prior) could be …
Aesthetics of musical timing: Culture and expertise affect preferences for isochrony but not synchrony
Expressive communication in the arts often involves deviations from stylistic norms, which can increase the aesthetic evaluation of an artwork or performance. The detection and appreciation of such expressive deviations may be amplified by cultural familiarity and expertise of the observer. One form of expressive communication in music is playing "out of time," including asynchrony (deviations from synchrony between different instruments) and non…
The Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance Data Collection
The Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance Data Collection (IEMPDC) comprises six related corpora of music research materials: Cuban Son & Salsa (CSS), European String Quartet (ESQ), Malian Jembe (MJ), North Indian Raga (NIR), Tunisian Stambeli (TS), and Uruguayan Candombe (UC). The core data for each corpus comprises media files and computationally extracted event onset timing data. Annotation of metrical structure and code used in the p…
Cross-Cultural Work in Music Cognition
Many foundational questions in the psychology of music require cross-cultural approaches, yet the vast majority of work in the field to date has been conducted with Western participants and Western music. For cross-cultural research to thrive, it will require collaboration between people from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as strategies for overcoming differences in assumptions, methods, and terminology. This position paper surveys t…
Bàtá
Timing and Meter in Mande Drumming from Mali
This paper focuses on two pieces, "Ngòn Fariman" and "Bire," representatives of two ethnically and regionally specific styles of Mande dance music from Mali, Bambara and Khasonka drumming. After introducing their performance contexts, instrumentation, and the basic roles of each part in their respective ensembles (i.e., the core metrical accompaniment, the piece-determining "hook," and the improvising and regulative lead drum), timing data from s…
Rhythmic Feel as Meter: Non-Isochronous Beat Subdivision in Jembe Music from Mali
This article studies the empirical structures and theoretical status of rhythmic feels in jembe music, which is a popular style of drum ensemble music from West Africa. The focus is onsystematic variations of durations(Bengtsson 1975)-that is, cyclic patterns of non-isochronous pulse streaming at the metric level of beat subdivision. Taking for example a standard piece of jembe repertoire that is set in a 4-beat/12-subpulse metric cycle (often no…
Performing Audience. On the Social Constitution of Focused Interaction at Celebrations in Mali
Anthropos , Seite 3 - 18
Donkili, Call to Dance, Festival Music from Mali
Rhythmic Feel as Meter: Non-Isochronous Beat Subdivision in Jembe Music from Mali
This article studies the empirical structures and theoretical status of rhythmic feels in jembe music, which is a popular style of drum ensemble music from West Africa. The focus is onsystematic variations of durations(Bengtsson 1975)-that is, cyclic patterns of non-isochronous pulse streaming at the metric level of beat subdivision. Taking for example a standard piece of jembe repertoire that is set in a 4-beat/12-subpulse metric cycle (often no…
Performing Audience. On the Social Constitution of Focused Interaction at Celebrations in Mali
Anthropos , Seite 3 - 18
Timing and Meter in Mande Drumming from Mali
This paper focuses on two pieces, "Ngòn Fariman" and "Bire," representatives of two ethnically and regionally specific styles of Mande dance music from Mali, Bambara and Khasonka drumming. After introducing their performance contexts, instrumentation, and the basic roles of each part in their respective ensembles (i.e., the core metrical accompaniment, the piece-determining "hook," and the improvising and regulative lead drum), timing data from s…
Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries
Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries, spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random ‘seed’ rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of ‘telephone’), such that their biases (the prior) could be …
Donkili, Call to Dance, Festival Music from Mali
Performing Audience. On the Social Constitution of Focused Interaction at Celebrations in Mali
Anthropos , Seite 3 - 18
Rhythmic Feel as Meter: Non-Isochronous Beat Subdivision in Jembe Music from Mali
This article studies the empirical structures and theoretical status of rhythmic feels in jembe music, which is a popular style of drum ensemble music from West Africa. The focus is onsystematic variations of durations(Bengtsson 1975)-that is, cyclic patterns of non-isochronous pulse streaming at the metric level of beat subdivision. Taking for example a standard piece of jembe repertoire that is set in a 4-beat/12-subpulse metric cycle (often no…
Timing and Meter in Mande Drumming from Mali
This paper focuses on two pieces, "Ngòn Fariman" and "Bire," representatives of two ethnically and regionally specific styles of Mande dance music from Mali, Bambara and Khasonka drumming. After introducing their performance contexts, instrumentation, and the basic roles of each part in their respective ensembles (i.e., the core metrical accompaniment, the piece-determining "hook," and the improvising and regulative lead drum), timing data from s…
Bàtá
Cross-Cultural Work in Music Cognition
Many foundational questions in the psychology of music require cross-cultural approaches, yet the vast majority of work in the field to date has been conducted with Western participants and Western music. For cross-cultural research to thrive, it will require collaboration between people from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as strategies for overcoming differences in assumptions, methods, and terminology. This position paper surveys t…
The Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance Data Collection
The Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance Data Collection (IEMPDC) comprises six related corpora of music research materials: Cuban Son & Salsa (CSS), European String Quartet (ESQ), Malian Jembe (MJ), North Indian Raga (NIR), Tunisian Stambeli (TS), and Uruguayan Candombe (UC). The core data for each corpus comprises media files and computationally extracted event onset timing data. Annotation of metrical structure and code used in the p…
Aesthetics of musical timing: Culture and expertise affect preferences for isochrony but not synchrony
Expressive communication in the arts often involves deviations from stylistic norms, which can increase the aesthetic evaluation of an artwork or performance. The detection and appreciation of such expressive deviations may be amplified by cultural familiarity and expertise of the observer. One form of expressive communication in music is playing "out of time," including asynchrony (deviations from synchrony between different instruments) and non…
Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries
Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries, spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random ‘seed’ rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of ‘telephone’), such that their biases (the prior) could be …
Round Table: Audiency beyond the Concert Hall: Theory and Ethnographic Case Studies
In recent years, the neologism audiency has found traction as a direct counterpart to the term performance , not least among theatre and performance scholars. 1 It announces audience research that is inclined to understand phenomena of witnessing as action and as involved in processes that stand in a mutually constitutive relationship with performance. This contrasts with the more familiar focus on groups of people (‘audiences’) and their constit…
Performance in the Round: Embedded Audiency at Music–Dance Events in Mali
In many West African dance-drumming genres, the emphasis is on involving the gathered community in the performance, inviting them to take turns dancing. In such performance contexts, there is no audience in the strict sense, no group of participants who are not themselves directly involved as performers. Based on ethnographic case studies of music–dance events in rural southern Mali, this article argues for the concept of embedded audiency, showi…
Art (6 works) · Neuroscience and Music Perception (6 works) · Psychology (5 works) · Visual arts (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works) · Communication (3 works) · Dance (3 works) · Music and Audio Processing (3 works) · Music Technology and Sound Studies (3 works)