JAVS Spring 2024

Memory, Anticipation, and Musical Time Having mentioned that time perception in music is an important parameter in my compositions, you might wonder: what are some ways that music can manipulate our sense of time? I employ three main parameters in Shubho Lhaw Qolo to achieve this: (1) Anticipation : Scientific studies have

which aspects of our environment we are aware of at a given time.” 7 This filtering process greatly influences our perception of beginnings in music. Our understanding of beginnings is intrinsically linked to how we listen to music and anticipate events that create new beginnings. This is because beginnings can only exist in the context of what came before them. Beginnings Throughout Shubho Lhaw Qolo , various sonorities are introduced, with their pace having been deeply pondered as I was composing the piece. While the limits of this article prevent me from going into too much detail regarding how these different sonorities are processed by the listener (how we process the seagull glissandos differently than we do human voices, which themselves are different than harp glissandos, etc…), it is enough to note that their respective perceptions signal to our attention to heighten. In the field of psychology, the privileged position that beginnings hold in our attention (as well as memory) is referred to as the primacy effect. 8 Music, like life, contains multiple temporalities articulated by overlapping and nested beginnings. For example, birth is one beginning, as is the first coming of consciousness, the first day of school, every time we wake up, etc. In music, there is the start of a piece, a phrase, a section, and beyond. All these factors form a complicated, interactive web of ways in which time and events interact with one another. Scientific studies about how we listen to music seem to confirm this. Huron states that “the listener’s attention is most acute at strong metric positions” and cites Carl Seashore who suggests that “attention may be periodic.” 9 What is certain, however, is that “we do not pay attention equally to all moments,” and that “attention is choreographed to coincide with the most likely moments of stimulus onsets.” 10 Of course, the importance of memory in parsing out phenomena must never be overlooked. As Snyder puts it, “memory influences how we decide when groups of events end and other groups of events begin, and how these events are related.” 11 In the beginning of Shubho Lhaw Qolo (figure 1), the difficulty of (metrical) timekeeping makes it so that events are that much more salient, and therefore have more potential to create new phenomena since there are no presumed metric (or even hypermetric) accents for which the listener’s attention ought to anticipate. Another

shown that time distorts and feels longer as we approach the end of goal-oriented tasks, while no distortion is observed when a goal is not present. Anticipation thus elongates musical time. 2 This principal stems from our innate desire to link past and future events, which makes us more focused on, and thus more likely to remember, what we perceive as critical beginnings and endings. 3 (2) Density : Consider also the “filled duration illusion,” which refers to a cognitive illusion in which a high level of stimulation stretches out one’s perception of time to make it feel longer than it would have with fewer stimuli. 4 (3) Loudness : Interestingly, the loudness of music can influence our time perception. Louder music tends to feel longer than quieter pieces. 5

These findings imply that faster, denser, and louder music slows musical time. 6 So how does this explain what happens in Shubho Lhaw Qolo ? In Shubho Lhaw Qolo , on p. 13, the music starts quietly, with fewer instruments playing, and then accelerates, crescendos, and grows denser with more instruments and increasingly more notes. These factors create anticipation for what is to happen next. Contrast that with the opening of the piece, which starts with a drone on the bass ornamented by instruments above it before the soloist enters. The “arrow of time,” if you will, is non directed as the drone helps to keep us grounded and focused on the present, thus creating a sense of what I like to call timelessness. However, individual listeners’ experiences also significantly impact their music perception. One’s long term memory “acts as something like a filter, determining

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Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 40, No. 1, Spring 2024