The Perception and Cognition of Time in Balinese Music

Three Central Questions

• Is Balinese time-in-music iconic of Hindu-Buddhist worldviews?
• Does music distort perception of objective duration?
• Do tempo changes follow biologically universal structures?

The Iconicity Claim

Becker (1981): Gamelan music is "deeply imbued with Hindu-Buddhist conceptions of reality."

Cyclic gong patterns supposedly reflect cosmological time, a non-teleological and non linear, "the intimation of eternity."

Is this an actual feature of musical temporality in cognition and in performance?

Testing "Weak Iconicity"

Iconicity: The possibility that cultural worldviews and musical structures are connected in cognition.

Clayton (2000): Musical cyclicity is metaphorical "no more a circle than it is a wave."

McGraw tests this empirically on Balinese musicians with an Implicit Association Test (IAT).

Implicit Association Test

F.C. Donders: "The time required to perform a mental computation reveals how the mind works."

Response latency indicates implicit or unconscious associations.

Faster sorting would then indicate stronger cognitive link between categories

IAT Experimental Design

Subjects sorted time terms indicating duration and music terms indicating gamelan structural forms into categories.

If time-in-music and time-in-general link is strong, pairing them should be faster than pairing music-space or dance-time. The setup is meant to show whether music temporality has a priviledge correlation with cultural time.

IAT Findings

Result: Only weak associations between time-in-music and time-in-general.

Wide individual variation—no homogeneous pattern among performers.

The iconicity claim finds little support in implicit cognition via this testing method.

The Critical Gap

However, all musicians verbally agreed with Becker's iconicity thesis when asked directly.

But their implicit associations showed otherwise.

The correlation then exists in discourse, but doesn't seem to exist in unconscious cognition.

Duration Perception Experiment

Musicians heard 10 gamelan snippets and estimated their duration on a timeline.

Normally, we would expect denser rhythmic textures to feel longer.

How does cultural familiarity change the perception of duration?

Majalan vs. Ngubeng

Majalan ("walking"): changing melody, feels longer

Ngubeng ("spinning wheels"): static and circular, feels shorter

33% of participants overestimated majalan snippets duration vs. 5% for ngubeng (same actual length)

The Dramatic Finding

Balinese musicians mostly underestimated durations (67-86%).

American musicians, not familiar with Malajan overestimated same durations.

Familiarity seems to induce more efficient processing thanks to a "time flies" effect.

The Exception

Only one example produced majority overestimation in Balinese musicians: the extended accelerando.

Changing tempo influences duration perception beyond rhythmic and melodic density alone.

Tempo change may recruit different cognitive mechanisms than information density.

Tempo Transformations

David Epstein (1985) proposed that rallentandos follow biologically-based curves, being the mental analog of a mechanical force.

Therefore, we would expect that all cultures should produce similar rallentando curves.

Do Balinese rallentandos follow these "universal" models?

Three Idealized Models

Linear: Constant decrease rate

Cubic spline: Force model, supposedly "biological"

Quadratic: supposedly "unnatural"

Balinese Participants Preferences

33% preferred linear supposedly "least natural"

31% preferred cubic spline

Only 14% preferred quadratic

No clear preference for "biological" curves.

Terraced Rallentandos

Not smooth curves, but terraced "like Balinese rice fields".

Sudden drop → stabilization → final curve

Against Biological Universalism

Idealized models are too simplistic for actual performance.

Internal clocks are flexible and context-sensitive shaped by training and culture.

Inter-domain cultural schemas (icons) are attractive because they are simplified world(s) that abstract from the manifold complexities of the real world and bring different domains of experience into alignment.

Convergent Information

Time-in-music results from "convergent information from different sources."

Biological, cognitive, and cultural models are not exclusive but always acting at the same time. The linking of music with extramusical concepts and images (of time, mandala or calendars, for instance) serves as an incredibly powerful mnemonic and pedagogical tool, however difficult it might be to prove such connections as directly causal or reflective.

Limits of Iconicity

Evidence: The unity of time-in-music and time-in-general is weak in actual cognition.

Simple reflectionism or iconicity is untenable.

Conclusions

Temporal perception is complex, fluid, individualized.

Modes of perception are partially learned and adjustable.

High individual variation indicate the preservation of agency within cultural frameworks.

"A journal of null results might be just as valuable as a catalog of intriguing patterns."

McGraw, A.C. (2008). Empirical Musicology Review, 3(2), 38–54.