How Music Works

Rolf Bader is a professor for Systematic Musicology, which he studied in Hamburg, Germany, together with Physics, Ethnology, and Historical Musicology. After teaching at Stanford University as a Visiting Scholar, he teaches at the Institute of Systematic Musicology at the University of Hamburg since 2007. His main research interests are Physical Modeling of Musical Instruments, Timbre and Rhythm Perception, Musical Signal Processing, Room Acoustics, or Music Ethnology. He also works on Self-organization and Synergetics of Musical Instruments and Music Perception. He is the editor of the Springer Handbook of Systematic Musicology, and wrote monographs like Computational Mechanics of the Classical Guitar or Nonlinearities and Synchronization in Musical Acoustics and Music Psychology, and edited volumes like Sound-Perception-Performance or Computational Phonogram Archiving in the Springer Series Current Research in Systematic Musicology, where he also is an editor-in-chief. He works as an Ethnomusicologist, mainly in Myanmar, Cambodia, China, India, or Sri Lanka. He is also a musician and composer in the fields of free improvised and electronic music, as well as Fusion and Rock, and published several CDs.