How do you experience (musical) time?

The terms openness to experience and energetic extroverts have been touched on in the blog “What type of listener are you?” To briefly recap psychologists have divided listeners into two camps with open listeners gravitating towards classical, blues, jazz and folk while energetic extroverts, the intense and rebellious tribe, like rock, alternative and heavy metal music. I would like to focus on one element of this division, the two tribal responses to rhythm. 

Composers and arrangers who use Sibelius software are aware of the export feature which permits the construction of a score as a combined video and audio presentation. The listener experiences a visual score with strict time audio, not a performance. Those who view the product (You Tube or similar) often express the opinion that a human interpretation would bring out additional qualities in the work otherwise lacking. Pulse, vibrato, micro tuning and coloured noise such as breath or key strokes all play some part in this evaluation.

Accepting the argument, I have on occasion taken a PDF of the score, imported the music into a DAW and played with the tempo to articulate particular moments of interest inserted accelerando and ritenuto passages, and even put in slight delays at expressive points, all with the intention of creating a more human response. One might think of this as a parallel to a person interacting with a piano roll. If the music contains a variety of different pulses as in the Chopin section of Schumann’s Carnaval the efforts seem sufficient to satisfy, but if the pulse is regular and less complex the comments about robotic v. human performance still occur. Does this suggest that open listeners require constant manipulation or decoration around a pulse while metronomic pulses are more acceptable to energetic extroverts?

To develop the idea let us consider the drum machine, and the Roland TR-808 in particular, a machine (instrument) designed in the 1980’s by the recently deceased Ikutaro Kakehashi. A little history lesson first, as a teenager he repaired clocks and watches, progressing from there to founding Roland Corporation famed for its work with synthesizers and of course drum machines. The TR-808 was used to generate the rhythm tracks of a large number of highly successful songs and became the basis of different rock styles, in other words a huge number of listeners were captivated by precise, machine driven rhythms. Over a period of time programmers added imperfections, humanizing elements, lasting fractions of a second, but randomized activity is not the same as choices made to push or drag the rhythm, nor can the machine sense the environment of excitement or relaxation after a musical climax created within a group of players.

Perhaps an energetic extrovert would argue that he/she has a best of both worlds scenario where the instrumentalists retain a strict beat, pleasing to the dancers, while the soloist plays or sings against the beat to provide sufficient variation in tempo to humanize the music. I understand that the deviations from the tempo only need to be be very slight, a movement of between 10 to 20 milliseconds can be recognized.

If we accept this argument then the result should be applicable to both open listeners and extroverts. The open listener might argue that the main difference would be in the interaction of players when a more distant goal is considered, and a gradual or progressive accelerando is required, something the Roland drum machine is not capable of performing.  Let us not forget that there are very successful popular works that play with tempo changes, “Come on Eileen” is a good example, it is unusual enough to have Wiki comment on the fact in its article. Popular pieces with numerous tempo changes can be hugely popular, Stairway to Heaven and Bohemian Rhapsody come to mind, but popular music is a broad church.

I came across a thought provoking quotation by Holger Hennig in Physics Today which develops this issue:

It turns out that human beat variation is not entirely random. In 2011, Hennig's team had looked carefully at the timing of a professional drummer and found that while his hits shifted ahead and behind the beat, they shifted according to a set pattern. Not only that, the highly precise patterns lasted for minutes. "It is as if the human brain has an enduring memory for those deviations,"

This takes us to another issue of time, memory and time perception.

In simple terms psychologists are viewing the perception of time as being different to our five senses, based on an internal clock or possibly clocks (not the biological or circadian clocks). The process of gathering information seems complex, requiring reorganization and distribution to various parts of the brain, but the crux of the matter is that regularly perceived events take far less time to process while novel or unique events take more time and our perception is that time is drawn out. At my age the question “Where does the time go?” takes on a different meaning. Experiments with subjecting a viewer to regular and occasional images for the same length of time have the person reporting the latter as being viewed for longer.  Musicians are also aware of how heightened emotional states alters the sensation of time, from the drumming of the shaman to the loss of self as experienced in the Ring cycle or the immersive compositions of Carl Stone.

Psychologists developed tests relating to time perception which focused on particular film genres, the results demonstrated that fearful reactions prolonged experience, over estimations of time when viewing horror were common. Professor Droit-Volet also notes

"quite unexpectedly, sadness does not affect our perception of time, no doubt because the emotion felt when watching a sad film is not strong enough to slow down physiological functions,"

As a musician I find that contrary to experience, listening to recordings of Clive Bell playing the Shakuhachi in pieces like Sanya Sugakaki induces a sense of stillness which makes the estimation of real time very difficult.

https://youtu.be/nEbmGsy7bao?list=PL8JEnivnOMpOn8SBOlkZ6Dd2UgpqKoEzM

The research is ongoing, I hope to learn more of the work being undertaken; the following quotation fascinates me

"There is no single, uniform time, but rather multiple times which we experience. Our temporal distortions are a direct translation of the way in which our brain and body adapt to these multiple times, the times of life."

Having spent some time with this issue before posting the blog I came to a simple resolution of the question regarding the difference between open listeners and energetic extroverts. When you are dancing to music it is much more difficult to follow a train of thought. There are several meditative systems that focus on ecstatic experiences through movement, the Sufi dervishes being one. The types of music preferred by open listeners involve detailed processes of manipulation where the church pew or concert hall seat is perfectly acceptable. Perhaps our musical preference is rooted in how we are inclined to express ourselves through body movement in which case we should reconsider how audiences are expected to be treated when listening to, let us say, an energetic John Adams work! I think that process is under way but has yet to reach its proper conclusion.

Thank you for sharing your time in reading the blog, please feel free to share any particular experiences you have relating to music and the perception of time.