Maria A. G. Witek holds a bachelor degree in musicology from the University of Oslo and completed her MA in music psychology at the University of Sheffield in 2008. Since then, she has worked as a research assistant at the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo, for the projects Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction and Music, Motion and Emotion. Having recently finished her D.Phil in music as a Clarendon Scholar at the University of Oxford, she is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Music in the Brain Group at the Centre for Functional Integrative Neuroscience, University of Aarhus, Denmark. Here, she is continuing her doctoral project, which investigated the ways in which complex, groove-based rhythms elicit the desire to move and feelings of pleasure in music, using both empirical (neuroimaging and motion-capture) and theoretical approaches. She has won a number of awards, most recently the Adam Krims Memorial Prize, for her essay ‘Filling in: The Relationship Between Body-Movement, Pleasure and Syncopation in Groove’. Maria is also the review editor of Popular Musicology Online.
Publications:
Vuust, P., Gebauer, L. & Witek, M. A. G. (in press): “Neural Underpinnings of Music: The Polyrhythmic Brain”. In Hugo Merchant (Ed.) Neurobiology of Interval Timing. Berlin & Heidelberg: Springer.
Witek, M.A.G., Clarke, E.F., Kringelbach, M.L. & Vuust, P. (in press): “Effects of Polyphonic Context, Instrumentation and Metric Location on Syncopation in Music.” Music Perception.
Witek, M.A.G., Clarke, E.F., Wallentin, M., Kringelbach, M.L. & Vuust, P. (2014): “Syncopation, Body-Movement and Pleasure in Groove Music”. PLOS ONE.
Carlsen, K. & Witek, M.A.G. (2010): “Simultaneous Rhythmic Events with Different Schematic Affiliations: Microtiming and Entrainment in Two Contemporary R&B Grooves”. In Anne Danielsen (Ed.) Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.
Witek, M. A. G. (2009): “Groove Experience: Emotional and Physiological Responses to Groove-Based Music” Proceedings of the 7th Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, ESCOM, University of Jyvaskyla.