Stimulus Complexity and Time Judgments

In my endeavour to try and understand the main mechanisms of time perception in electroacoustic music, I explored complexity and how it can affect our experience of timescales and passing of time. This experience ultimately influences our understanding of structures and balancing of sections, our appreciation of gestural and textural development, and the interconnection of concurrent, near and remote events. For the purpose of this research, important papers in time perception written mainly from cognitive psychologists have been examined, and relations to music perception were drawn. A list of situations where complexity may occur in electroacoustic music, with an emphasis on acousmatic music, has been compiled.

The relationship between complexity and psychological time, based on theories of Hogan, Priestly and Ornstein, is followed by an examination of complexity related to various parameters of sound.