Understanding Musical Instants

Abstract

We may typically experience music as continuous streams of sound and associated body motion, yet we may also perceive music as sequences of more discontinuous events, or as strings of chunks with multimodal sensations of sound and body motion, chunks that can be called ‘sound-motion objects’. The focus in this chapter is on how such sound-motion objects emerge at intermittent points in time called ‘musical instants’, and how musical instants are necessary in order to perceive salient features in music such as of timbre, pitch, texture, contour, and overall stylistic and affective features. The emergence of musical instants is also understood as based on the combined constraints of musical instruments, sound-producing body motion, and music perception, also suggesting that understanding musical instants may have practical applications in making music.