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The Importance of Husserl's Phenomenology of Internal Time THEIMPORTANCEOFHUSSERL'SPHENOMENOLOGYOFINTERNAL TIME-CONSCIOUSNESS FOR MUSIC ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION GeorgBoenn University of Glamorgan Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries ABSTRACT between the temporal position of a phase and the now- point. On the other hand, there is a comparison process Starting with Edmund Husserl’s seminal text[7] we would betweenthecurrentperceptualcontentandpastproten- like to explore in this paper how musical perception is tions. We assume that learning processes originate from based on the conscious reduction of acoustic and spatio- here, which influence the generation of further proten- temporal diversity into unity. In his lectures Husserl ex- tions. emplifies his views with an analysis about the perception Recently, David Huron[6] drew from the current body of a single soundanda sequenceof soundswithin a melody. of research in cognitive musicology with regards to learn- They deliver an informative basis for us in order to re- ing and expectation processes in music listening in order think the perception of musical time and the perception of to develop his own ITPRA theory 1 . Huron’s focus is on rhythms in particular. We demonstrate the impact of his the emotional responses to expectations that root deeply phenomenology on music analysis and composition. in the history of human evolution. Based upon Husserl’s Phenomenology and upon no- 1. INTRODUCTION tions of the Gestalt-Psychology we programmed tools that analyse music recordings in search for temporal expres- Husserl’s lectures have been very influential on musicians sive profiles of performances and which generate tran- and composers during the past century. We mention the scriptions representing the underlying score[1]. To achieve conducting school of Sergiu Celibidache, especially his these goals we had to develop a deeper understandingabout student Markand Thakar[16][15], Husserl influences on the perception of rhythmic Gestalten and how musicians Henri Bergson and throughhim on french composer Charles express themselves through timing. This led also to no- Koechlin. Furthermore, we see references to Bergson in tions of self-organisation, which feed back into composi- Susanne Langer[9] and we find a discussion of her views tion techniques of polyphony and variation. on ’time as passage’ and references to Koechlin and Berg- son in an essay by Eliott Carter[2][12]. It is also noted that the Berlin school of Gestalt-Psychology has its roots in the 3. ONSET RHYTHMS school of Brentano, with whom Husserl, Carl Stumpf and Christian von Ehrenfels studied at the same time. There The onset of a sound is very important for the percep- are numerousreferences to Gestalt-Psychology in the wider tion and recognition of musical timbres and the learning musicological field: from Diana Deutsch’s Psychology of of timbre categories. “[...] Researchers [...] have found Music[3] over Tenney’s Meta-Hodos[14] back to Heinrich that [sound source] identification relies on onsets. Iden- Schenker’s Ur-linie[11]. tification is accurate if listeners hear onsets, and poor if they don’t. [...] the lack of onsets made it harder to iden- tify the blown instruments in particular.”[8] If the presence 2. RETENTIONS AND PROTENTIONS or non-presence of the onsets are of such an importance it might well be that their occurences leave markers in the Husserl’s term of retentional consciousness[7] is related consciousness which enable and support certain types of to what cognitive psychology later describes as working rhythm processing in the brain. memory. The counterpart to the retentions are the proten- From the phenomenologicalpoint of view an onset is a tions that point towards the horizon of expectations. The primal impression from where a field of running-off con- origin of the protentions are the now-points. Protentions tinua starts to devlop that belongs to the entire time-object are expectations about the immediate future. They are ’sound’. Husserl states that the now-point is a “creative born immediately out of the now-point and are derived now”, from where a chain of ever new now-points starts. from the current perceptions, which reside in the impres- Husserl is then interested in the effects on the intentional sional consciousness. The consciousness compares per- consciousness caused by the primal impressions. The con- manently the contents of the perception originating from sciousness creates for every new now-point of the sound the now-point with retentional phases of earlier content within the working memory. Those phases sink further 1 ITPRA stands for the sequence of the following expectation-related down into unconsciousness the more distance is created responses: Imagination, Tension, Prediction, Reaction and Appraisal. Figure 2. A perceived rhythm E1 and its four retentional layers E2-5 and also by Hegel[4], which leads to the awareness of rhythmic relationships between and within sounds, their dynamism and their self-induced organisation. Husserl speaks of the consciousness of succession. It means that the relationship of two sounds (A - B) sinks Figure 1. OE series of now-points; OE’ Sinking-down; down in the consciousness and its content changes as well EE’ Continuum of phases (now point with horizon of the as its perception through the flow of consciousness, be- past); E-> Series of nows which possibly will be filled cause the consciousness of the individual sounds A and with other objects B as well as their relationship remain within the reten- tions that Husserl calls the primary memory. These are a vertical phase continuum of all past now-points of the the reference points for all future sounds, whose new rela- time-object, it samples at that particuar moment the reten- tionsships are integrated with the past sounds and relations tional phases within the running-off continua (see figure 1 through the retentional memory. Here all sounds are being for Husserl’s original diagram). The entire process of the continously transformed “the way that” they appear. consciousness has a double intentionality. It means that The physical inter-onset-time between the sounds A the consciousness directs itself towards the perception of and B is of main importance for the perception of the du- the sound in its unity as a time-object, but at the same time ration of sound A. Although a pause might happen after A it is capable of perceiving all minute changes of the sound for reasons of articulation, A might have decayed before through the internal time consciousness. the attack of sound B, their relationship remains charac- To perceive a rhythm means to relate one sound with terised by the full time span bewteen them. Of course, other sounds by means of duration ratios and thereby to one can connect this pause with both sounds and obtain learn and to recognise explicit rhythm categories[5][10]. a relation of three elements. With regards to articulation These processes are based on the selective division of the and phrasing this type of musical silence between notes time-flow by the attentive consciousness. On the other becomes more stringent and convincing if it is carried out hand there is duration inherent to the sound, a continu- with proportions in mind, proportions that take care of the ous flow and metamorphosis from one state into the other, conscious participation of all three elements in that se- a multitude of dissolutions, cross-fades and indiscernible quence: A - silence - B. It is also clear that the now-points spectromorphological changes. The latter refers to the of the onsets and the perceived durations and relationships experience of subjective duration that Charles Koechlin between different sounds remain at the same position in recognised after being influenced by Bergson[2]. Susanne time within the retentional consciousness. Only in this K. Langer said: ”The primary illusion of music is the way it is possible to learn and to recognise rhythmic cat- sonorous image of passage, abstracted from all actuality egories and their Gestalten. According to Husserl, this is to become free and plastic and entirely perceptible.”[9] It due to the a priori condition of the homogeneity of abso- is that notion of passage that has been very influentual lute time and has obvious implications for the perception on Eliott Carter. The free development of passage be- of time objects. comes also the prevalent theme within acousmatic music It is now possible to draw a map of the original time that wants to free itself from all academic and worn-out field within the rententional consciousness. From the con- ways of dealing with sounds and composition[13]. tinuum of the now-points we select only the note onsets and inter-onset times. It is further assumed that the mem- 4. RETENTIONAL RHYTHMS ory keeps the time-object ’note’, which consists of its on- set, its sound continuum and its duration, within a contin- We would like to focus not only on one side of the dou- uous feedback loop. The following example in figure 2 ble intentionality of the consciousness, which is becoming illustrates the time field by using a ternary rhythm as its aware of the sounds as streaming entities of passage, but base. also to consider the other intention understood by Husserl The original rhythm is presented here on the 1st staff with the next four retentional layers on seperate staves belows. Every note on the retentional layers represents the starting point of a new cycle of the feedback loop that keeps the original note as a time object in memory. Lines connecting the notes illustrate the sequence of on- set repetitions per feedback loop. The crossovers of the sequences are based on the different durations within the original rhythm. This polyphony of retentional rhythms has a number of remarkable properties. All layers are different from each other. None of them is identical to the original rhythm Figure 3.
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