Abstract
Music is known to alter people's ordinary experience of space and time. Not only does this challenge the concept of invariant space and time tacitly assumed in psychology but it may also help us understand how music works and how music can be understood as an embodied experience. Yet research about these alterations is in its infancy. This review is intended to delineate a future research agenda. We review experimental evidence and subjective reports of the influence of music on the representation of space and time and present prominent approaches to explaining these effects. We discuss the role of absorption and altered states of consciousness and their associated changes in attention and neurophysiological processes, as well as prominent models of human time processing and time experience. After integrating the reviewed research, we conclude that research on the influence of music on the representation of space and time is still quite inconclusive but that integrating the different approaches could lead to a better understanding of the observed effects. We also provide a working model that integrates a large part of the evidence and theories. Several suggestions for further research in both music psychology and cognitive psychology are outlined.
Highlights
The way people orient themselves and behave in the world essentially depends on spatial and temporal magnitudes
FOR FURTHER RESEARCH Regarding the impact of music on the representation of time, we can draw the following conclusions: (1) Typically, music leads to an underestimation of the length of time intervals; (2) attention appears to be one of the most important factors when explaining the impact of music on time perception; and (3) when taking additional variables into account—such as arousal, emotional expression, familiarity, and likability—the results become inconsistent and are no longer satisfactorily explained by the existing approaches
FOR FURTHER RESEARCH Apparently, we are not able to provide a final conclusion about the influence of music on the representation of space
Summary
The way people orient themselves and behave in the world essentially depends on spatial and temporal magnitudes. Because people describe the world in terms of space and time continually, it should be of the utmost interest to psychologists to consider the representation of these concepts when thinking about psychological processes in each domain of their research. We sought to analyze the alteration of the subjective representation of space and time using a simple and ubiquitous everyday behavior that is known to affect people’s normal state of consciousness: listening to music. We give an overview of the research that has been done with music and that has provided evidence of the multiple ways in which listening to music can influence the ordinary representation of space and time. Arousal potential, and likeability into account, leaves us with a rather puzzling picture: In some cases, time interval estimates are in a positive relationship with these variables but in other cases, the relationship is negative
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