Meet the educators

The educators, Alexander, Hans and Kristian are all associate professors at the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo, Norway. For this run of Music Moves they are also joined by the recent PhD fellow Mari. They all share the passion for music and movement, even though they come to the topic from different perspectives.

Alexander Refsum Jensenius started his university studies as a classical piano-playing mathematics student, but ended up with a music degree focusing on electronic music. He values creativity and artistic output as highly as scientific results, and therefore likes to call himself both a “music researcher” and “research musician”. He has been studying and researching in Oslo, Berkeley, Gothenburg and Montreal, often focusing on weird and experimental musics. After focusing on large-scale body motion for several years, he has now turned his interest to “micromotion”. These are tiny actions happening in the body, often at a millimetre scale. Alexander wants to understand how music influences such micromotion, but also how he can use micromotion in music performance. He has two daughters that move to music.

Hans T. Zeiner-Henriksen has been teaching various courses in music production, music history (pop/rock), popular music studies and music psychology/cognition since 1994. He completed his PhD in 2010 called “The PoumTchak Pattern: Correspondences between Rhythm, Sound and Movement in Electronic Dance Music”. His research is concerned with the connections between music and movement, particularly in the club music of the 1990s (Daft Punk, Basement Jaxx). He was also part of the research project “Music, Motion and Emotion: Theoretical and Psychological Implications of Musical Embodiment,” in which he mainly studied how corporeality takes part in intense emotional experiences in music. He has three daughters that move to music.

Kristian Nymoen studied both musicology (Master’s) and informatics (PhD) in Oslo. His interdisciplinary background is highly reflected in his research, which covers development and usage of technologies for studying music-related body motion. He develops analysis methods for music cognition, new interfaces for musical expression, machine learning techniques, and more. He is also an active guitarist and live electronics musician. He has one daughter that moves to music.

In addition to Alexander, Hans, and Kristian, you will also visit other world-leading professors from the University of Oslo in their offices. Hallgjerd Aksnes is an expert on emotion and metaphor theory in music. Rolf Inge Godøy is an expert on embodied music cognition. Anne Danielsen is an expert on groove and rhythm, particularly in popular music.

Why Music Moves?

There has been a lot of research in the field of music-related body movement over the last decades, and the University of Oslo has been at the forefront in the field. The educators in Music Moves have been running a research-based course called “Music and Motion” at the University of Oslo for several years, and were eager to share their ideas more broadly. When the University of Oslo looked for courses to be transformed to online courses, Alexander, Hans and Kristian were easy to ask, and so Music Moves was born!