Temporal Gestalt Perception in Music

Abstract

For the historian, time is not the undifferentiated continuum of the theoretical physicist, but a hierarchically ordered network of moments, incidents, episodes, periods, epochs, eras, etc.-i.e., time-spans whose conceptual are determined by the nature of the events or processes occurring within them (or of the historian's interpretation of these events or processes). Similarly for the musician, a piece of music does not consist merely of an inarticulate stream of elementary sounds, but a hierarchically ordered network of sounds, motives, phrases, passages, sections, movements, etc.-i.e., time-spans whose perceptual boundaries are largely determined by the nature of the sounds and sound-configurations occurring within them. What is involved in both cases is a conception of distinct spans of timeat several hierarchical levels-each of which is both internally cohesive and externally segregated from comparable time-spans immediately preceding and following it. Such time-spans (and the events or processes which define them) will here be called temporal gestalt-units (or TGs).