Music, Evolution, and the Experience of Time

Abstract

This chapter explores the psychological structure and perception of time in music in light of recent theoretical discussion and proposals for specific features of the human faculty for music—qualities that are at once universally present and operational in music across cultures whilst also being unique to our species and to the domain of music. The author contends that music’s architectural foundations—configurations of musical pulse, musical tone, and musical motivation—provide a sustained attentional structure for managing personal experience and interpersonal interaction and offer a continually renewing phenomenological link between the immediate past, the perceptual present and future expectation. A crucial and distinguishing feature of our experience with music is thus the particular way in which we share intersubjective time and enact and create an extended moment by constantly merging from one perceptual present into the next.