Music Listening, Music Therapy, Phenomenology and Neuroscience

4 –Time, Space and the Environment

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become "now," and "now" turns into unalterable fact. Such passage

is measurable only in terms of sensibilities, tensions, and emotions;

and it has not merely a different measure, but an altogether different

structure from practical or scientific time.

The semblance of this vital, experiental time is the primary illusion

of music. All music creates an order of virtual time, in which its

sonorous forms move in relation to each other - always and only to

each other, for nothing else exists there. (Langer, 1953)

Langer's view is shared by Jonathan D. Kramer (1988) who states that "the
age-old idea that time is out there, is questionable. Events, not time, are in

flux. And music is a series of events, events that not only contain time, but

also shape it."
Music listening gives rise to three kinds of temporal experience, the

time of movement and events, the time of pulse, and the temporal ex-

perience; related to apparent musical stasis or slow, barely perceptible
changes of musical states, the time of being.

The time of being
The time of being is the kind of time we experience when no other sensa-

tions of time impose themselves on our consciousness. The time of being
is sometimes called timelessness, moment time or eternal time. It is the

time experienced in nature when we are not near a clock or watch, and we

are not expecting something to happen, and we are not impatient for a
change to occur. The time of being may be experienced as "timelessness"

because we lack a habitual sensation of time that runs or elapses or passes

by.
In a civilization governed by timekeepers, there is a prevailing tendency

to forget the time of being, consider it out of the ordinary, or ignore it

completely. But the time of being is recalled in the experience of nature, the
universe, and living beings. We know that a child and a plant grow and

that a flower opens and turns and closes itself, but we do not perceive the

minute changes constituting these processes. We see that the snow is
falling, but we do not discern the movement and direction of the single

snowflake. We know that the tide rises and falls, that the sun and the moon

move across the sky (or so it seems from our viewpoint), but we don't
sense the movement as such.

The core of this kind of temporal experience is that we realize or know

that something is changing or being transformed, but the process of
change is so slow or imperceptible that it escapes our immediate sensory

experience.

The time of movement and events
The sime of movement and events is derived from everyday experience. A

movement directed towards a goal is perceived as having a beginning, a