CANCELED: Meeting—March 7th, Mariusz Kozak

CANCELED: March 7th, 2024, 3-5pm
Mariusz Kozak, “Improvising Musical Time: A Perspective from Embodied Cognition.”
In-Person and Online.
Fayerweather Hall (Room 513), Columbia University, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York

Improvising Musical Time: A Perspective from Embodied Cognition.

Music is said to be a temporal artform, but what exactly does that mean? In my work, I’ve argued that musical time emerges from interactions between sonic events and the embodied responses of participants—performers and listeners alike. More specifically, musical time is enacted when we coordinate our movements, ranging from surreptitious tapping and head-nodding all the way up to full-blown choreographies and vigorous headbanging, with what we perceive to be opportunities for action. We improvise time with and through our bodies when we use our knowledge of what movement feels like to turn explicit events (the present) into implicit ones (the past), and implicit events (the future) into explicit ones (the present).

Mariusz Kozak is Associate Professor of Music and Director of Cognitive Science at Columbia University. He is the author of Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music (Oxford University Press), which won the 2023 Society for Music Theory Emerging Scholar Award, and in which he examines how listeners’ understanding and experience of musical time are shaped by bodily actions and gestures. His research centers on the relationship between music, cognition, and the body. Kozak bridges experimental approaches from embodied cognition with phenomenology and music analysis, in particular using motion-capture technology to study the movements of performers and listeners. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Spectrum, and Music Theory Online, among others. His article “Feeling Meter: Kinesthetic Knowledge and the Case of Progressive Metal” (Journal of Music Theory) won the SMT Outstanding Publication Award in 2023. He is currently working on two book projects: on the cultural and intellectual history of the cognitive science of music, and on musical creativity and artificial intelligence.