How Music Messes with Our Sense of Time
I always jog to music because I find that it helps pass the time. When I get in the groove, the 30 minutes seems to fly buy. Same thing when I’m driving.
I know those sorts of things have happened to you, too. Music seems to mess with our perception of time. Why? This is the subject of an article at Nautilus:
One evening, some 40 years ago, I got lost in time. I was at a performance of Schubert’s String Quintet in C major. During the second movement I had the unnerving feeling that time was literally grinding to a halt. The sensation was powerful, visceral, overwhelming. It was a life-changing moment, or, as it felt at the time, a life-changing eon.
It has been my goal ever since to compose music that usurps the perceived flow of time and commandeers the sense of how time passes. Although I’ve learned to manipulate subjective time, I still stand in awe of Schubert’s unparalleled power. Nearly two centuries ago, the composer anticipated the neurological underpinnings of time perception that science has underscored in the past few decades.
The human brain, we have learned, adjusts and recalibrates temporal perception.
