Filippo Bonini Baraldi

Filippo Bonini Baraldi is Principal Researcher at the Instituto de Etnomusicologia (INET-md) of NOVA University, Lisbon, where he leads the research group “Ethnomusicology and Popular Music Studies” and integrates the Board of Directors. He is also associate member of the Centre de Recherche en Ethnomusicologie (Crem-LESC) of Université Paris Nanterre, France.

His academic career developed through various geographic and scientific areas. He obtained a MSc degree in Electronic Engineering at Padova University (Italy, 2001), completed a second MSc degree in Music Technology at the IRCAM (Paris, 2003), and accomplished a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology at Paris Nanterre University in 2010 with the jury’s unanimously honors. He obtained a doctoral grant by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS, 2003-06) and a post-doctoral fellowship by the Society of Ethnology of Nanterre (E. Fleichman, 2011). His doctoral research has been awarded the prestigious international Ph.D. thesis prize by the Quai Branly Museum (Paris, 2011).

Filippo Bonini Baraldi has been lecturer in ethnomusicology at the Music Department of Paris 8 St. Denis University (2007-2014), where he created a course on the subject of Music and Emotion; Invited Senior Professor (2014-2015) at the Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Brazil, invited professor at the Music Department of NOVA University, Lisbon (2015-2020). He has also been invited to give conferences and courses in many Universities, including Univ. College (London), Univ. La Sapienza (Rome), Collège de France (Paris), Univ. Federal do Pernambuco (Brazil), Charles University (Prague), Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey), Ghent University (Belgium), etc.

He participated in the creation and the scientific coordination (2005-10) of the research network RTP “Music, Cognition, Societies”, funded by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), has been invited researcher in the project Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance (AHRC, UK, 2016-18) and Principal Investigator of the FCT funded project “HELP-MD: The Healing and Emotional Power of Music and Dance” (2018-22).

His researches on music, emotion, and health, based on long term fieldworks in Romania, Italy, and Brazil, are strongly interdisciplinary and combine methods of ethnomusicology, music computing, and cognitive sciences. In his book “Tsiganes, musique et empathie” (FMSH, 2013, book prize by Academie Charles Cros) he proposed an anthropological theory on the emotional power of music, which highlights a human tendency to engage in empathic relations through and with the sonic artefacts. This is an important contribution for the broad field of research on musical emotion, which focus almost exclusively on Western classical music and on an ethnocentric view of the human being.

Improved translations of his book have been published Romanian (2017, The Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities), English (2021, Oxford UP, honorable mention by the ICTMD, W. A. Douglas Prize in Europeanist Anthropology by the Society for the Anthropology of Europe) and Italian (in press, Ed. Museo Pasqualino). Other publications include book chapters (Routledge, Springer, Indiana UP, Oxford UP, Kimé, Dunod etc.) and papers in scientific journals such as Music Perception, Journal of New Music Research, Music & Science, Ethnologie Française, Visual Anthropology Review, Cahiers d’Ethnomusicologie, and others.

Filippo Bonini Baraldi is also a violinist and a filmmaker of music documentaries (Prize of the French Society of Ethnomusicology at the XXIV Festival “Jean Rouch”, Paris, 2005, for the film “Crying for the dead”).