Oluwatosin John Ibitoye

Dr. Oluwatosin John Ibitoye is a Lecturer in the Department of Performing Arts and Film Studies at Kwara State University, Nigeria. He holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Ilorin, Nigeria. His research and publications explore Nigerian music, performance, and cultural expression, and he has presented his work at international conferences across Africa, Europe, and North America. He has received research fellowships and grants from institutions including the Harriet Tubman Institute at York University and the Central European University and is an Associate Fellow of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diasporas.

Across my research, music functions as a technology of negotiation: between local epistemology and global circulation, between human activity and environmental crisis, and between gendered voice and public space. My work traces this negotiation through ethnomusicology, digital culture, ecomusicology, and gender and performance studies.

My doctoral work developed a “Glocal Musicianship Model,” an eleven-concept framework that reads contemporary Nigerian musicians such as Beautiful Nubia and Lágbájá through glocalisation theory and the Yorùbá Ọmọlúàbí philosophy. A revised article from this research is under review at Cultural Trends in a special issue on methods in cultural and creative industries research.

I also study gendered musical traditions. My fieldwork on the Baluu and Kengbe secular music of Ilorin women produced the concept of the “sonic closet,” a framework for understanding how women's musical spaces encode expression that is publicly audible yet socially concealed. My ecomusicology work extends this same attention to power and voice into the environment. My paper on the soundscapes of flooding in Lagos was presented at a Harriet Tubman Institute workshop and is now under review for a book collection.

Digital culture is where this negotiation becomes most urgent and where my current work is concentrated. My project, Algorithmic Agency in Nigerian Popular Music, examines how streaming platforms and recommendation systems shape which Nigerian musicians and sounds circulate and how artists exercise agency within or against those systems. Alongside this, I am building Remembering COVID-19, an archive of Nigerian pandemic songs treated as a repository of collective memory during a crisis. This is a collaborative research project with Tolulope Osayomi, a 2025–2026 KASC Research Affiliate. Both projects need a stronger digital humanities methodology than ethnomusicology alone provides, particularly for modelling circulation patterns and structuring archival material.