Mariusz S. Kozak

Mariusz Kozak is Associate Professor of Music and Director of Cognitive Science at Columbia University. His first book, Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music (Oxford University Press), which won the 2023 Society for Music Theory Emerging Scholar Award, 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. In 2020 he was one of the keynote speakers at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory. 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 writing two books: one on the cultural and intellectual history of the cognitive science of music, and another on creativity and artificial intelligence.

Kozak is an affiliate of Columbia's Zuckerman Institute.

Kozak received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2012. Prior to coming to Columbia University in 2013 he was a postdoctoral scholar at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
 
As a violinist, Kozak has performed with the Rochester Philharmonic, the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, the Santa Fe Opera, and the Santa Fe Symphony. After a stint with a Chicago-based country band, he continues to fiddle around in his spare time.