What Can the Temporal Structure of Auditory Perception Tell Us about Musical “Timelessness”?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Timelessness” is an area of intense interest for many composers and authors interested in 20th- and 21st-century music, but it is not always clear exactly what the term denotes. In particular, the distinction between the induction of timelessness (the listener’s subjective experience of time is altered or suspended by music) and the perception of timelessness (the listener recognizes that the music expresses altered or suspended time) has yet to be clarified. This paper argues that, while experiences of timelessness may be induced by a wide variety of musics and are not necessarily contingent on specific musical qualities, the perception of musical timelessness involves relationships between music’s temporal organization and the temporal structure of auditory perception. Of particular interest are segmentation, sequence, pulse, meter, and repetition. Music whose temporal organization optimizes human information processing and embodiment expresses “human time,” and music whose temporal organization subverts or exceeds human information processing and embodiment points outside of human time, to timelessness. This hypothesis is illustrated with examples from the 20th-century repertoire by Truax, Ligeti, Crumb, Reich, Tenney, Messiaen, and Grisey, music that has been associated with timelessness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".