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DjembeDance – Multimodal rhythm in music and dance from West Africa

What may we learn about rhythm when we understand it multimodally, as music and dance, rather than mainly as an auditory phenomenon?

People are dancing to djembe music in Mali.

Djembe music/dance performance on the occasion of a community celebration; Dogoro (southern Mali), 2020. With the consent of the performers pictured. Photo: Rainer Polak.

About the project

DjembeDance is a comprehensive study of rhythm in djembe drumming and dance from Mali, exploring the coordination, interaction, and integration of rhythmic patterns in a genre of participatory music and dance performance. The collaborative project builds on a large set of multimedia recordings of live performances, combining multitrack audio, multi-camera video, and 3D motion tracking data.

Crowd of people at a celebration; recording engineer with high-tech equipment sitting at a table; several dancers and drummer perform; one dancer wears a sport-like suit from stretch material — Field recording for the DjembeDance corpus; Saguele (southern Mali), 2018. (A) Polak changes battery and SD card in preparation for replacing a camcorder while monitoring the motion capture recording of a dancer visualized in real-time on a notebook. (B) A motion-tracked dancer wearing a sensor-hosting suit spurs on and claps along with other dancers. (C) Motion-tracked dancer mimics an animal with sticks representing front runs. (D) One clip-on microphone and one piezo pickup are attached to the membrane of each drum. With the consent of the performers pictured. Photos: Nori Jacoby (A), Rainer Polak (B, C, D).

We bring together a team of ethnomusicologists, dance scholars, cognitive scientists, and data scientists, combining computational corpus analysis using statistics and machine learning, with ethnographic fieldwork, scholarly music and dance analysis, and psychological experiments.

Aim

While rhythm research has focused on music as sound and auditory cognition, people often communicate rhythmicity through multiple modes of expression and sensory modalities at once. This holds for speech, ritual, work, and exercise as well as for music and dance.

Emphasizing the cultural and social condition of human interaction, we aim for the study of multimodal rhythm in the "naturalistic" context of real-world performance practices. To this end, the project advances the field of empirical choreomusicology, radicalizing the interdisciplinary nature of integrated music/dance studies by combining qualitative, humanities-based and quantitative, scientific methods.