Dominik Phyfferoen teaches jazz double bass and is an independent ethnomusicologist. He studied ethnomusicology in Ghana with Professor Kwabena Nketia and cultural musicology at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Currently he is affiliated with the University of Ghent, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Institute of African Studies and the Department of Musicology, IPEM the institute for psychoacoustics and electronic music.
He worked for many years as an affiliated research fellow with Professor Kwabena Nketia at ICAMD, International Center for African Music and Dance at the University of Ghana, Legon and as a researcher at the Department of Cultural Anthropology/Audio-Visual Archive of the RMCA- Tervuren, Belgium where he was responsible for making audio-visual field recordings in Ghana, processing the recordings with metadata into the DEKKMMA – Project and the MIMO-Project at the Tervuren Museum.
For the last few years his research and writings are focused on cultural transformational processes in the “Dagbon Hiplife Zone in Tamale”, an urban popular music culture located in the Northern Region of Ghana. His research on traditional music and dance in Dagbon is based on extensive fieldwork and defining key elements of embodied music interaction, the intensity factor and the Sahelian factor in the traditional and contemporary idiom of music making.