Experiencing Musical Time

What is musical time? How does it relate to our experiences with music and what methods can we employ to better understand this relationship? Music has an ability to bring awareness to time and manipulate our experience of it -- from experiences of timelessness in response to encounters of minimalism and Electronic Dance Music to the subtle feeling of momentum and vivacity in the rhythms of a jazz solo. Experiencing Musical Time tackles the question of these temporal experiences with music through an interdisciplinary lens, connecting research in psychology and neuroscience to theories and analyses of music. Drawing from empirical research on time perception to ground the language and metaphors we use to describe time in music, Kristina Knowles demonstrates new ways of understanding and conceptualizing interactions between musical structures and temporal experiences. Taking a synoptic approach to musical time, Knowles weaves together a wide array of theories, methods, and empirical findings in analyses of various musical repertoires, including the common practice period, popular music, jazz, and postmodern musical styles. From subtle shifts in perception to the extremes of altered temporal states like timelessness, the author examines how musical parameters interact with a listener's stylistic familiarity and embodied response to shape diverse experiences of musical time. Presenting a unique fusion of perspectives, Experiencing Musical Time will be insightful for readers in music theory, musicology, music cognition, and cognitive science.

Kristina Knowles is affiliate faculty of Music Theory and Psychology at Arizona State University, where she taught undergraduate and graduate courses on music theory and music cognition as an Assistant Professor. Her work combines research in music theory, philosophy, and psychology around questions of rhythm and meter in twentieth-century music, perception, and the relationship between music and time.