Polak, Rainer, & Doumbia, Noumouké (2022). Learning to dance in rural Mali. In A. v. B. Wharton & D. Urbanavičienė (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.
Rainer Polak is an interdisciplinary rhythm researcher specializing in djembe drumming and dance from Mali and in cross-cultural variation in rhythm perception and production. He is an (incoming) associate professor in the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo (from fall 2024) and leads the project DjembeDance at the RITMO Centre at the same university.
In the 1990s, Polak studied social anthropology, African languages, and African history at the University of Bayreuth (Germany), where he earned an MA degree in 1996 and a PhD in 2002. Since then, he has also taken sociological, ethnomusicological, performance-theoretical, music-theoretical, empirical-musicological, and cognitive-scientific perspectives; recently, he has been developing an approach to empirical choreomusicology (integrated music/dance studies) and embarked on studies in the cross-cultural neuroscience of rhythm perception. In addition to his career as a researcher, he has also taught djembe drumming up to the university level and repeatedly organized concert and workshop tours to Europe and the US for music/dance performers from Mali.