The Perception and Cognition of Time in Balinese Music

Abstract

This article describes experiments designed to determine the perception and cognition of time-in-music among Balinese gamelan musicians. Three topics are discussed. First, the proposed connections between cultural/religious concepts of time and the construction of (time in) gamelan music are explored. Here a novel and experimental use of the Implicit Association Test is incorporated to explore potential implicit (unconscious) connections between concepts of time-in-music and time-ingeneral. Only weak associations are found. Second, the author explores music's influence in subjects' ability to gauge objective durations. Other than a tendency for Balinese subjects to consistently underestimate actual timings, and the potential for tempo changes to influence response patterns in specific ways, few strong patterns are found. Third, previously proposed models for the performance of tempo changes (here, rallentandos) are explored in the context of gamelan music.Results from perceptual tasks and an analysis of performance suggests that previous idealized models are too simplistic to describe the Balinese case. THE conflation, common in musicology and anthropology, of time-in-music with time-in-general (or, time in cosmological senses) invites all sorts of well-documented problems and paradoxes (see Rowell, 1979Rowell, , 1985Mayr, 1985). Given too much time to ponder it, we are easily over-stimulated by certain eccentric truths concerning time: Definitions of time are impossible as nothing resembles it. Our concept of time is an intellectual and cultural achievement (Gibson, 1975). Pitch, timbre, and harmony are but a complex spectrum of oscillations (tempos). Music, as we know it, exists somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between the rhythmic oscillations of galaxies and those of the atom. From the physicist's perspective, music is but the play of time. As we have no organ with which to sense time directly, humans can only perceive time through the motion-reckoning of various 'clocks' (literal clocks, biological clocks, atomic decay, etc.) all of which create sound, however minute and inaudible.[2] Sound is literally time's measure (Clynes & Walker, 1986).Such interesting arcana thrusts us into a swirl in which the potential philosophical connections between music, time, and practically all other phenomena threatens to overwhelm; we are in danger of "losing ourselves in the infinite" (Sachs, 1953, 18). This should be checked, however, by an understanding of human modes of perception and cognition; we might conceive of time and tempo as a boundless continuum, undulating in beats from galaxy to atom, but this is not how we perceive it-such a suggestion has no cognitive reality for our sensory system. We do not perceive pitch as rhythm. The fundamental limits of our short-and long-term memories have profound implications for how we understand and experience the difference between the groove,[3] rhythm, meter, form and overall structure of music. In this article I work to tease apart the conceived and percei...

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