Introduction
My interest in the human perception of time began a few years ago, when I was still a professional violinist, playing with a number of different orchestras, chamber ensembles, and even rock groups. I became increasingly aware of how music can shape and alter how time flows for us, both listeners and performers. When I finally rejoined the world of academe, as a PhD student at the University of Chicago, time rather naturally became the central focus of my research, and over the course of my work I began to realize how the experience of time, and temporal events in general, is guided by our own movement in the world which we occupy. More specifically, I came to realize that music-related gestures help shape our experience of musical time, and by extension, musical form.
My stay at the University of Oslo, funded by the Fulbright Commission, will allow me to focus on an empirical investigation of this relationship between musical gestures and musical time. This work will form an important part of my dissertation, which deals with gesture and meaning in Western classical art music from the last 30 or 40 years. In particular, I am interested in how listeners move when there is no perceivable beat, or when such beats are present but cannot be perceptually organized into a metrical scheme. Little is know about this type of gestural behavior, most research having focused on entrainment, or the ability to synchronize to a steady pulse. Yet so much of our movement in daily lives, with a notable exception of walking and running, is irregular. This means that we are not necessarily hard-wired for regular movement to a musical pulse, but rather for movement to music in general. And this is the starting point of my research, which will then delve into questions of gesture-based music analysis, of the different socio-cultural contexts of music listening, of neurocognition and the role of music in motor therapy, and even speculations of music's place in the onto- and phylogenetic development of humans.
Contact:
email: mariusz.kozak@imv.uio.no