Ben Duinker (he/him) is a Montreal-based music researcher, percussionist, educator, and choral singer. Raised in a musical family from Halifax, Nova Scotia, he first studied civil engineering but switched career paths at age 21. Duinker holds a PhD in Music Theory and a MMus in Percussion Performance from McGill University and is currently a researcher with the ACTOR (Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration) Project, where his work focuses on diverse topics such as expressivity in percussion performance, trap music, and chord voicing in Renaissance polyphony.. He also performs and tours with the Montreal-based quartet Architek Percussion.
Duinker’s research spans various genres of popular and art music—focusing especially on hip hop—and addresses analytical topics such as rhythm and meter, tonality, timbre, performance, and orchestration. He uses data-driven corpus studies and music analysis as a starting point to explore popular music’s production, creation, perception, and reception. Completed in 2020 under the supervision of Nicole Biamonte at McGill University, his doctoral dissertation on hip-hop flow was awarded an SMT-40 Dissertation Fellowship by the Society for Music Theory. Duinker also undertakes research that connects his dual backgrounds as a theorist and performer specializing in contemporary art music. This work uses analysis of recordings, ethnography, and pedagogical methods to explore topics such as interpretive difficulty, embodiment, and experiential learning. Duinker developed this analysis/performance research under the supervision of Aiyun Huang at the University of Toronto, where he held a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) Postdoctoral Fellowship (2020–2022). In 2021 he hosted the inaugural Dialogues: Analysis and Performance symposium at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music, bringing together artists and scholars of contemporary music for three days of presentations, performances, and exchange.
Duinker’s work is published or forthcoming in the journals Current Musicology, Empirical Musicology Review, Journal of Music Theory, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, Music Theory Online, Music Theory Spectrum, Popular Music, and SMT-V, and in Xenakis Matters, a collection of analytical essays on the music of Iannis Xenakis. He has presented his work at conferences, roundtables, and invited talks in Canada, the United States, and Europe, and has held numerous fellowships and grants from SSHRC, FRQSC (Fonds de recherche societé et culture du Québec), and the Montreal-based Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT).
