Olof Misgeld

Olof Misgeld is a senior lecturer at the Department of Folk Music at KMH and programme director for the Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes in Folk Music. His research explores artistic practices within folk music, with a particular focus on music for dance.

About the researcher

Olof is a folk musician and fiddler. He has studied with, among others, Ellika Frisell, Jonny Soling, and Sven Ahlbäck. As a performer, he has played in groups such as Fri Form Folk, BLM, and Oleman. Since the 1990s, he has also worked as a dance musician and created and performed music for theatre and dance.

Olof’s playing is influenced by traditional fiddling styles from different regions of Sweden, with the relationship between music and dance serving as a recurring point of reference. He has been active at KMH since 2002 as a teacher and in roles including programme director, associate senior lecturer, and departmental representative. He supervises theses and teaches folk music theory, improvisation, music for dance, style analysis, and more.

Research description

In 2025, Olof completed his doctoral dissertation, “Music-Dance Mediations – Performance Explorations into an Asymmetrical Type of the Swedish Polska”, KTH 2024. The dissertation includes both scholarly and artistic studies of the rhythm and metre of the polska in music and dance. Olof’s research focuses on modes of expression in Swedish folk music, with a particular emphasis on how the interaction between playing and dancing can be understood, communicated, and deepened. The research is conducted in collaboration with leading dancers, educators, and choreographers in the field and draws on music theory, music technology, and artistic-practice-based methods.

Olof is also participating as a researcher in the artistic research project “The Unquantised Human”, see link below. The project looks at how the way music is articulated affects how musicians interact and how listeners experience phrasing, rhythm, and swing in different types of music.