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Time and Timelessness in Electroacoustic Music

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Time and Timelessness in Electroacoustic Music Experiences of Time and Timelessness in Electroacoustic Music JASON NOBLE, TANOR BONIN and STEPHEN MCADAMS Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Montreal, Canada Email: [email protected] Electroacoustic music and its historical antecedents open up now moment’ (Hasty 1997) in music, while often pro- new ways of thinking about musical time. Whereas music found and personally important, is not especially rare. performed by humans is necessarily constrained by certain In her book Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and temporal limits that define human information processing Trancing, Judith Becker opines that ‘most of us have and embodiment, machines are capable of producing sound experienced “near trance”, or at least some of the char- with scales and structures of time that reach potentially very acteristics of trance at certain times in our lives, far outside of these human limitations. But even musics produced with superhuman means are still subject to human especially in relation to musical listening or musical constraints in music perception and cognition. Focusing on performance :::. Deep listening or performing music five principles of auditory perception – segmentation, may induce the feeling of time stopping altogether’ grouping, pulse, metre and repetition – we hypothesise that (Becker 2004: 131–3). musics that exceed or subvert the thresholds that define Paraphrases of this kind of experience pervade the ‘human time’ are likely to be recognised by listeners as literature on twentieth- and twenty-first-century expressing timelessness. To support this hypothesis, we Western music. Titles such as The Time of Music report an experiment in which a listening panel reviewed (Kramer 1988), On Repeat: How Music Plays the excerpts of electroacoustic music selected for their Mind (Margulis 2013) and Being Time: Case Studies temporally subversive or excessive properties, and rated them (1) for the pace of time they express (normative, in Musical Temporality (Glover, Gottschalk and speeding up, or slowing down), and (2) for whether or not the Harrison 2019), as well as myriad statements from music expresses ‘timelessness’. We find that while the composers about ‘a vertical cut, as it were, across hor- specific musical parameters associated with temporal izontal time perception’ (Stockhausen 1963, quoted in phenomenology vary from one musical context to the next, a Heikenheimo 1972: 120–1), ‘music as frozen time’ general trend obtains across musical contexts through the (Ligeti 1988, quoted in Bauer 2004: 129), ‘temporal excess or subversion of a particular perceptual constraint by suspension’ (Grisey, 1987: 249, original emphasis) a given musical parameter on the one hand, and the and so forth, all speak to widespread fascination with subjective experiences of time and timelessness on the other. special relationships between music and temporal experience. While some have argued that experiences of altered time or timelessness are not deterministically 1. INTRODUCTION related to definable musical properties (Rouget 1985, quoted in Becker 2004:25–6), certain types of music It is sometimes possible for me to be completely appear more frequently in discussions of musical time- immersed in music and to feel as if my whole state of con- sciousness has been temporarily altered. lessness than others. In particular, two seemingly opposite types of music, defined by a strong and regu- Music sometimes helps me ‘step outside’ my usual self lar pulse on the one hand and the prolonged absence of and experience an entirely different state of being. pulse on the other (Mountain 2003: 672), are fre- When listening to music I can lose all sense of time. quently invoked; J. T. Fraser describes these as ‘the The above statements are taken from the Absorption in ecstasy of the dance’ and the ‘ecstasy of the forest’, Music Scale questionnaire (Sandstrom and respectively (Fraser 1975: 305–6). Russo 2013: 227–8), an index used to assess listeners’ Non-Western musics such as African drumming, propensities for musical absorption. The statements Javanese gamelan and Japanese gagaku are often cited demonstrate a link between music, absorption and as musics that invoke non-normative experiences or the experience of time, a link that will no doubt be conceptions of time according to Western standards, familiar to many readers. Across musical styles, cul- especially those of time as ‘cyclical, reversible, tures and historical periods, music’s amazing power recurrent, connected to the cycles of nature and the to alter or even suspend the listener’s sense of time activities they control’ (Monelle 2000: 86). Non- is well documented. The sensation of the ‘eternal Western musics have also been important sources of Organised Sound 25(2): 232–247 © Cambridge University Press, 2020. doi:10.1017/S135577182000014X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 69.157.187.184, on 06 Aug 2020 at 14:45:26, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S135577182000014X Experiences of Time and Timelessness in Electroacoustic Music 233 inspiration for Western composers seeking to express only performable tempi will be performed: the action- ideas of altered time and timelessness. Olivier Messiaen, able tempi afforded by human kinesthetics and whose titles famously invoke ideas of eternity, immortal- cognition set limits within which musical tempi must ity and the end of time, was inspired by the ‘static’ abide. But when electronic production makes it possi- quality he perceived in Japanese noh and gagaku, and ble to set any tempo however fast or slow, the practical the affinity he felt it had with ‘the invisible and the significance of the limitations of ‘human time’ beyond’ (Messiaen, quoted in Eppstein 2007:212). becomes much more palpable. According to Martin Scherzinger, Ligeti’sengagement The hypothesis of Noble (2018), supported with with African music was the basis of the ‘static tension numerous examples from twentieth- and twenty- and temporal transcendence’ that characterised his aes- first-century repertoire, is that music whose tempo- thetic ambitions after 1980 (Scherzinger 2006:236–7). ral organisation optimises human information Another influence that continues to exert a profound processing and embodiment expresses human time, influence on Western thinking about musical time and and music whose temporal organisation subverts timelessness comes in a non-human form: electronic or exceeds human information processing and technologies, which make possible electroacoustic embodiment points outside of human time, to time- musics. Such technologies are obviously invented by lessness. Due to space limitations, the present article humans, but they are non-human to the extent that they cannot revisit all of the constraints of human audi- enable the production of ‘superhuman’ musics: produc- tory information processing and embodiment, and ing sound events of durations so vastly protracted or the connections that these may have with human contracted, achieving tempos so unattainably fast or music making and music perception, that are pre- slow, exhibiting degrees of almost unimaginable rhyth- sented in Noble (2018). For a full discussion of mic complexity with such microscopic precision, these topics, please see that earlier article, which executing groupings and superpositions of layers in pro- we take to articulate the theoretical basis of the portions so far outside our capacity for perceptual present project. Here, we elaborate on links differentiation, that they confront us with the limits between many temporally subversive or excessive of our ability to process information or embody musical compositional techniques and the temporal thinking sound, and point (potentially very far) beyond them. In associated with electronic media. In short, we short, electroacoustics present us with the possibility of believe that non-human means of production facili- disembodied music, of music whose production cannot tate the expression of non-human temporalities. We even theoretically be conceived in terms of embodied believe not only that composers have used time cognition. scales and structures accessed through electronic In Noble (2018), it is argued that certain time scales means to engender musical timelessness, but also and threshold values define human auditory percep- that listeners presented with such scales and tion (e.g., the beat zone, the perceptual present), and structures are likely to interpret them as expressing that music – through its temporal organisation – musical timelessness. We put this hypothesis to presents a sort of temporal fiction that may conform the test with a perceptual experiment conducted at ’ closely to those human scales and values or may McGill University s Music Perception and Cognition Lab, detailed in the following. depart from them to varying degrees. For instance, to take the example of the beat zone: humans can entrain to a beat or pulse within a tempo range of roughly 30 to 300 beats per minute (bpm), correspond- 2. HUMAN PERCEPTION, SUPERHUMAN ing to an inter-onset interval (IOI) of roughly 0.2s to PRODUCTION 2s. Within this range, some tempi tend to be perceived Traditional Western music has unsurprisingly gravi- as fast, some slow and some in the ‘indifference zone’, tated towards the scales and structures of human corresponding to about 100 bpm (0.6s IOI), which time, as it is written by human composers and played tends to be perceived
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