Abstract
We evidently have features at different timescales in music, ranging from the sub-millisecond timescale of single vibrations to the timescale of a couple of hundred milliseconds, manifesting perceptually salient features such as pitch, loudness, timbre, and various transients. At the larger timescales of several hundred milliseconds, we have features such as the overall dynamic and timbral envelopes of sonic events, and at slightly larger timescales, also of various rhythmic, textural, melodic, and harmonic patterns. And at still larger timescales, we have phrases, sections, and whole works of music, often lasting several minutes, and in some cases, even hours.
Features at these different timescales all contribute to our experience of music, however the focus in the present chapter is on the salient features of what has been called sonic objects, meaning on holistically perceived chunks of musical sound in the very approximately 0.5 − 5 s duration range. A number of known constraints in the production and perception of musical sound as well as in human behavior and perception in general, seem to converge in designating this timescale as crucial for our experience of music.
The aim of this chapter is then to try to understand how sequentially unfolding and ephemeral sound and sound-related body motion can somehow be transformed in our minds to sonic objects.