Evaluating the Psychological Reality of Alternate Temporalities in Contemporary Music

Abstract Experiences of modulated temporality commonly accompany musical listening, but how music can produce experiences of modulated temporality as it unfolds in real time remains obscure. This chapter discusses psychophysical relationships between ‘real-time’ trajectories of musical/sonic parameters and listeners’ experiences of musical time and timelessness. It reports selected findings from an empirical study focusing on listeners’ responses to two excerpts from Gérard Grisey’s Vortex Temporum, a piece in which the composer deliberately employs different temporalities. This is in keeping with the current volume’s themes of relations between music and temporal experiences, the interplay between objective and subjective senses of time, and, more broadly and speculatively, the psychological models of time as they relate to human perceptual processes and associated states of consciousness.