Time in music

The issue of temporal perception is clearly relevant to any study of musical rhythm. My thesis on periodicities in music proposed that periodic events which recur at a rate higher than approximately 6 seconds are very unlikely to be perceived as periodic without other related factors, due to the intervention of psychological effects and memory processing. See music theory page.

Issues of psychological time and its relation to music have been a favourite subject for my explorations, and my thoughts on them can be traced in the following: "Temporal Aspects of Music - Perception of Time", "Perception of Time through the Lens of Music" and "Factors that Influence our Perception of Time through Music".

The article The Breathing of Time in(to) Music outlines my speculations on the specific factors within the music itself which will tend to expand or shrink our sense of time. This was a focus of the design of my electroacoustic work Eddies in the River of Memory. Many of my compositions consciously examine aspects of temporal issues, as described in the article Composition: my laboratory for auditory perception research.

I am now collecting all of these topics into a book entitled A Musician's Guide to Time.