Music and Time Dilation: Time Travel with Music

Have you ever been so focused on something that you could swear that more time has passed than actually has? This is called time dilation and music can affect the regions in the brain that calibrate and are responsible for adjusting temporal perception. If you wouldn't mind, listen to this music while you read the article to experience my time dilation music.

Moving on...

The ability to encode and decode information is fundamental to human survival. It allows us to find our place in the physical world and it helps us to navigate it. Music demonstrates that time perception is inherently subjective and is an integral part of our lives. We conceive of time as a continuum, but classical music theory and most popular songs represent time as a bunch of individual units that we use to measure it. Objective time is dictated by clocks, while subjective time aligns to physiological metronomes such as your heart beat.

Music embodies or is embodied within a separate quasi-independent concept of time and is able to distort or negate “clock” time. This other time creates a parallel temporal world in which we are prone to lose ourselves, or at least some semblance of objective time and to enter a somewhat zen-like state.

Neuroscience has given some insights into how music creates an alternate temporal universe. During periods of intense perceptual engagement, such as being entranced by music, activity in the prefrontal cortex which is responsible for introspection shuts down. The sensory cortex becomes the focal point for processing and the ‘self-related’ cortex shuts down. The term ‘losing yourself’ can be coined here. Rather than enabling perceptual awareness, the role of the self-related prefrontal cortex is reflective like a mirror, evaluating the significance of the music to the self. During intense moments, time seems to stop, or rather, not exist at all.

While ‘losing yourself’ is not always commonplace, the distortion of perceived time is very common and routine. Broadly speaking, the brain processes timespans in two ways, one in which an explicit estimate is made regarding the duration of a particular stimulus — perhaps a sound or an ephemeral image—and the second, involving the implicit timespan between stimuli. These processes involve both memory and attention, which modulate the perception of time passing depending upon how stimulated we are. Hence time can “fly” when we are occupied, or seem to stand still when we are waiting for the water in the kettle to boil. Unlike the literal loss of “self” that occurs during intense perceptual engagement, the subjective perception of elongated or compressed time is related to self-referential processing. An object—whether image or sound—moving toward you is perceived as longer in duration than the same object that is not moving, or that is receding from you. A looming or receding object triggers increased activation in the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortices—areas important for subjective awareness.

The directionality of musical melody and gesture evoke similar percepts of temporal dilation. The goal-oriented nature of music provides a framework in which a sense of motion is transposed to sonic structures, and the sensation of “looming” and “receding” can be simulated independently of relative spatial orientation. The subjectivity of time perception can be grounding and self-affirming—a source of great pleasure, or, conversely, able to create a state of disassociation with one’s self—a state of transcendence. Considering the composer’s goal of distorting time perception, musical time is notated with remarkable imprecision and ambiguity. Composers, more often than not, rely upon qualitative rather than quantitative directives to inform performers of the intended tempo. This is why it is very important to feel the music.

In the music I posted above (which I hope is still playing), I played while thinking back upon my day, such as that of recreating the memory and diving into and almost replaying what happened in my mind. I have to say, when I stopped playing and glanced at the clock, I thought it had been 8-10 minutes, when it had really been 22. The piano clip was also created as I was trying to learn a new scale with some chord progressions so it may sound a bit rough.

-lucid

Did you know that long after the metronome was invented in 1815, composers continued to avoid strict measures of time in their compositions, relying purely on the description or feeling of the piece?