By way of a multidisciplinary approach, this article advances the idea that our listening to certain practices of contemporary art music (electroacoustic, classical contemporary, and electronic music) relies on precise connections to the early stage of perception. These styles of music are characterised by essential sound configurations that evolve in time, thus eliciting a sensorial impact which transcends features regarding sound sources and affective responses. Listeners grasp what Scruton calls ‘pure events’ in a ‘world of sound’, being able to distinguish, separate and sort acoustic stimuli. The article establishes a key parallel among seminal works of Bregman, McAdams, Kubovy, Bayle and other authors, highlighting a fundamental agreement of perceptual studies in psychology, neurophysiology and musicology for the understanding of the early stage of sound perception. Music practices typical of this perspective develop certain sound configurations, such as figure/ground arrangements, recurrent elements and morphological distinction, that closely mirror our innate mechanisms of prediction in perception. A parallel is made between studies in the philosophy of perception and the neurophysiology which allows us to postulate the idea that these styles of music are essentially based on pure temporal proto-objects.

What takes place in the minds of composers when they struggle to incorporate a given temporal concept into a musical work? Spectral composers have produced detailed theoretical proposals about time in music, but how exactly those ideas influenced their musical practices remains an extremely challenging question. Graphical representations in their sketches provide invaluable clues. Through the analyses of Gérard Grisey’s and Kaija Saariaho’s manuscripts, we show how the theoretical frameworks for the basic cognitive operations of blending and anchoring, which underlie the construction of complex meanings, can shed light on the intricate musical uses of timelines by spectral composers. We combine the universal claims of this cognitive analysis with the diachronic perspective of a musicological study, teasing out the mental paths that these composers may have followed to create novel aesthetic proposals from their experience with graphic representations of sound, mainly spectrograms, and from techniques of electroacoustic studios. Thus we pave the way towards a common language for understanding time representation across electroacoustics and music in general, based on this mixed methodology. Through such shared tenets, the cognitive study of music can reciprocally contribute to burgeoning fields such as time representation, meaning construction and creativity.

We introduce an analytical methodology to approach the perception of time in the electronic works Thema: Omaggio a Joyce (1958), by Luciano Berio, and Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–6), by Karlheinz Stockhausen. Such works have already been widely analysed and discussed. Moreover, similarities between them have been pointed out, such as the use of the voice as their main compositional material and the search for a continuum between the voice and electronic sounds. Despite their similarities, we argue that the perception of time in those works is significantly different. For that purpose, we bring theoretical references such as time concepts related to complex dynamic systems, and the perception of time according to the Gestalt theory. We discuss segmentation and texture evolution in time of both works employing graphical representations based on perceptual audio descriptors such as the mel scale and the volume. In addition, aiming to find recurrences, repetitions and variations of the spectral material in time, we apply phase space graphs addressing the values of the descriptors employed in the analysis. The features found will lead to conclusions on the emergence of time perception in which the continuity depends on the presence of similar events, periodicities and pregnancies, while discontinuity is given by the presence of more variation, instability and saliences. We emphasise the differences of form perception in those pieces, arguing that they are the result of the manipulation of sound materials and organisation in time by the composers.

This article aims to elaborate Horacio Vaggione’s theoretical approach towards electronic music composition and his understanding of the musical structure, and to discuss how some of his key concepts come into presence during the compositional experience of temporality. Following the introduction of object-oriented composition and musical networks, I will discuss the concept of morphology alongside an investigation of how these ideas relate to temporality. In addition to this inquiry, I will briefly explore the possibilities of an ontological discussion on Vaggione’s compositional mindset and how his temporal perspective differs from some of his colleagues.

In this article, I explore the relationship between the temporality of the composer and that of the music composed. This investigation starts with a fundamental presumption: composers, generally speaking, think in the future – their compositions will be performed and perceived at a different and later time than that of the compositional act, and will be listened by other persons. The hypothesis I develop in this article is that the musical work determines a deferred relationship between the listener and the composer, and that the compositional act is basically a dialogical act. Paul Ricœur’s theory of mimesis is helpful in analysing this dialogical mechanism through the notion of ‘temporal configuration’. By drawing on this theoretical framework, I interviewed five composers in order to make explicit the imbrication of the composer’s and listener’s temporalities in the musical work. This exploratory inquiry allowed for a concrete analysis, articulated in the words of the composers, of how they conceive the relationship between their compositional temporality and that expressed by their work.

A growing number of musicians are recognising the importance of re-thinking notation and its capacity to support contemporary practice. New music is increasingly more collaborative and polystylistic, engaging a greater range of sounds from both acoustic and electronic instruments. Contemporary compositional approaches combine composition, improvisation, found sounds, production and multimedia elements, but common practice music notation has not evolved to reflect these developments. While traditional notations remain the most effective way to communicate information about tempered harmony and the subdivision of metre for acoustic instruments, graphic and animated notations may provide an opportunity for the representation and communication of electronic music. If there is a future for notating electronic music, the micro-tonality, interactivity, non-linear structures, improvisation, aleatoricism and lack of conventional rhythmic structures that are features of it will not be facilitated by common practice notation. This article proposes that graphic and animated notations do have this capacity to serve electronic music, and music that combines electronic and acoustic instruments, as they enable increased input from performers from any musical style, reflect the collaborative practices that are a signpost of current music practice. This article examines some of the ways digitally rendered graphic and animated notations can represent contemporary electronic music-making and foster collaboration between musicians and composers of different musical genres, integrating electronic and acoustic practices.

This article describes an innovative compositional method based on the use of a sonic time-lapse algorithm to create soundscape audio montages. The method is based on the superposition of short audio samples of 24-hour continuous field recordings carried out in various kinds of wildlife sonic environments. The optimisation of the algorithm focused on the enhancement of gradual crossfade transitions between recorded samples and the use of variable sample durations as a way of recreating a natural sense of evolution of sonic events in time. Future developments of the project will integrate virtual reality interfaces and environmental education projects as part of the time-lapse algorithm machine-learning techniques and also creative tools suitable for multimedia installations.

This article concerns the temporal experience of acousmatic music, how the music can impact a listener’s sense of time passing and the implications of memory and expectations of auditory events and their perceived connections to one another. It will outline how memory and schemas lead to predictions in the immediate future and larger expectations of a work’s form. An overview of the temporal listening framework for acousmatic music will be provided to show the interrelationship between memory and expectations and how they influence one’s listening focus in the present. Trevor Wishart’s Imago will be used to illustrate how one might compose an acousmatic work to promote active listening using compositional techniques that engage personal schemas and those built through the course of experiencing the piece.

‘Rhythm’ is often equated with ‘metered pulse’; as the latter is often eschewed by contemporary music, including acousmatic music, this is often assumed to mean an absence of rhythm. This article proposes that, in fact, acousmatic music does indeed contain rhythmic qualities, and further, that rhythm is one of the dominating forces of acousmatic music, even when pulse or metre at first glance appear to be lacking. This stems from the roots of acousmatic philosophy in phenomenology and a steady focus on our experience of the world around us. Importantly, this points simultaneously towards rhythmic qualities of our environment and towards rhythmic qualities of our embodied experience of that world, due to rhythmic aspects of our bodies, our perception and our cognitive faculties.

This article explores timescales within absolute and psychological times, and identifies the many factors that affect our perception of time passing and estimation of durations, which inevitably influence our perception of musical structures; in particular, it discusses listening experiences, and theoretical approaches to psychological states and emotional responses. It proposes a process according to which the time-influencing factors operate between listener and music. The discussion is approached through the lens of the electroacoustic composer and makes references to short excerpts from the author’s work and related repertoire. However, as the article discusses time in relation to sound structures, it is also relevant to other time-based sound art and music.

Electroacoustic music and its historical antecedents open up new ways of thinking about musical time. Whereas music performed by humans is necessarily constrained by certain temporal limits that define human information processing and embodiment, machines are capable of producing sound with scales and structures of time that reach potentially very far outside of these human limitations. But even musics produced with superhuman means are still subject to human constraints in music perception and cognition. Focusing on five principles of auditory perception – segmentation, grouping, pulse, metre and repetition – we hypothesise that musics that exceed or subvert the thresholds that define ‘human time’ are likely to be recognised by listeners as expressing timelessness. To support this hypothesis, we report an experiment in which a listening panel reviewed excerpts of electroacoustic music selected for their temporally subversive or excessive properties, and rated them (1) for the pace of time they express (normative, speeding up, or slowing down), and (2) for whether or not the music expresses ‘timelessness’. We find that while the specific musical parameters associated with temporal phenomenology vary from one musical context to the next, a general trend obtains across musical contexts through the excess or subversion of a particular perceptual constraint by a given musical parameter on the one hand, and the subjective experiences of time and timelessness on the other.

Many aural analytical methods have been produced for electroacoustic music that focus on the identification of salient morphological features of the sounds. Doing so, they usually overlook the importance of time – a central aspect of music – sometimes by considering it as a simple compositional parameter. However, this article proposes a novel theoretical framework for electroacoustic music understanding by putting time and its cognitive representations during perception at the forefront. Two concepts are introduced to propose this alternative approach to electroacoustic music description: temporal directionality, which focuses on the sounds themselves, and temporal distancing, which focuses on the relations between sounds. Throughout this article, several musical examples are given to briefly exemplify how such concepts can be used in an explanatory context. Finally, polychrony is introduced, which aims to describe how electroacoustic composers play with the various cases of temporal directionality and distancing, and, in the process, actually weave time itself.

Using a mixture of physiological evidence and analogies of time, the author describes the current version of a model of how we might view our interactions with time in music and beyond. An older model designed for analysis of complex twentieth-century acoustic works is updated to incorporate varied profiles of electroacoustic music. Recent research in auditory systems corroborates that we receive different types of information simultaneously through different channels, each taking more or less periodic sampling from different bands of frequencies – from timbre to phrase length and beyond. In order to acknowledge both the primitive structures of our complex hearing mechanisms and the different profiles of listeners, it is suggested that this multiple-sampling strategy may operate in a parallel way at a much larger scale, thereby allowing us to integrate the listener’s preference for pacing, contrast and densities of activity into the sensory processing of a musical work. The article is enriched by insights from soundscape pioneer Hildegard Westerkamp relating to various aspects of the discussion, from sensory overload to ecological concerns to the natural rallentando of a soundwalk. Finally, a whimsical elaboration based on the analogy of time as a river is presented in order to incorporate a more organic set of characteristics into our appreciation of music and time.