A Model of Musical Time(s)
Kristina L. Knowles · 2025
Abstract Chapter 2 presents the ideas and concepts associated with each of the three superordinate categories of the ICMT: Time as External, Time as Internal, and Time as Musical. The chapter examines these categories in detail and provides an initial discussion of their interactions, mapping several existing theories of musical time onto this framework. Time as External encompasses views of time as measurable and discrete, appearing explicitly in some approaches, such as proportional analyses, and more subtly in others, including certain quantitative approaches to meter. This category is often presented in opposition to Time as Internal. Present in nearly all theories of musical time, Time as Internal treats time as fluid, mutable, and individual, aligning with psychological research on subjective time. These categories interact with Time as Musical in various ways: directly through discussions of music-evoked temporal experiences and bodily engagement, and indirectly through analyses of how music represents temporal concepts.