The experience of music is infused with time. Notation outlines the melody and harmony, and these can exist (sometimes for centuries) on paper. Melodies are stored in memory on magnetic tape or as 0’s and 1’s in a digital file, but only time brings music to life. A manuscript can be read, a file assessed, but music must be heard in real time to conjure emotion. Once summoned from the magical streaming cloud or, as a gift from the muses, created from whole cloth, it is the element of time that weaves music into emotional meaning.

In 1989 I participated in a Sun Dance led by the renowned Lakota medicine man Leonard Crow Dog. The enduring memory I retain of that four-day event is the music. A large ceremonial drum was stationed under a cedar bough arbor, with several drummers in a circle around it hitting the drum in unison. A slow steady beat reverberated through a high desert canyon until it seemed the entire earth was resonating to this beat.  The beat sustained the dancers and centered the onlookers.  I know my heart rate must have entrained to that slow steady tempo, as did all the dancers and onlookers. The drum united us in consciousness and purpose. If I stop and recall I can still hear it, I can still feel it. This is the most visceral musical experience of the power of slowness I have ever had, and it changed my thinking about music. While most of the research on drumming indicates that very fast beats can entrain brainwaves and facilitate an altered trance-like state, slow tempo alters time perception.

The word control can be loaded, a word tinged with rigidity and manipulation, but let’s get real! As therapists we need to be in control of our treatment space, and part of that is controlling the flow of time. Music is a time-based flow of information.  If it is open-ended with no beginning, middle, and end, a constant burbling in the background, the flow of time is uncontrolled. It must then be managed by a clock or an external knock on the door if you are blessed to have an assistant. The therapeutic flow and flow of time from the clock can often be at odds. Music can be the medium of interface.

“Sandwiched between past and future is something called ‘the present’. Although we pass our entire lives in the present…we can’t really put our finger on that moment we call ‘now’. - Robert Jourdain, Music, the Brain and Ecstasy.

Philosopher William James said, “The practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions in time.” There is a modern psychological term for the moment of now. It is called the perceptual present. In a therapeutic sense, it is within this flow of perceptual presence that we experience music, and it is in this perceptual flow that healing happens.

In Praise of Slowness author Carl Honore, describes a conversation with a music student at a prestigious music school after hearing a concert of classical music played in a deliberately slowed down tempo. “I thought the slow tempo would make it boring, but it was the opposite…At the end I looked at my watch and thought ‘Wow, two hours already.’ The time went a lot faster than I expected.”

Oddly, slower tempo music which I use in several of my ambient albums,  can make it seem like time is passing more quickly, or it can render a sense of timelessness, where time is put on hold as the event, in the case of therapy, the therapeutic shift or healing, happens outside of linear time in the shamanic state of consciousness.

The perceptual present is fluid, and in this sense, time is also fluid. In music the paradox is that slower tempo, a slower flow of information, can change our perception of time. It can expand the perceptual present unlocking the infinite sense of timelessness.