Introduction

Suzanne Langer, in chapter 7 of 'Philosophy in a New Key', introduces the idea that 'music symbolizes lived time' - that music, being essentially temporal, is an undulating stream of sonorous tension stretched over time. She proposes this idea as child to her overarching theory of the arts, where each art form assumes a certain 'virtual' nature that mirrors an aspect of the human experience. By 'virtual', she means something immediately and publicly available to perception, but not available for practical action.

This essay will first detail Langer's view of musical temporality, and then attempt to clarify Langer's general assumptions regarding the way in which time is continuous. It will then be argued that perhaps the role of memory is missing from Langer's conception of 'virtual time', building from the idea that memory does not merely store past experiences but actively constructs our ongoing perception.

2. Langer's Concept of Musical Temporality

To follow Langer's argument for 'virtual time', we must first detail the differences between 'lived time' and 'clock time'. If you turn your ear toward the faint ticking behind you, or if you can imagine doing so, you likely already have a decent idea of what might define 'clock time'. The purpose of a clock is to keep time. Each hour passed is identical. The distance travelled by the hour hand between the numbers 6 and 7 is the same as the distance between 7 and 8.

Lived time, on the other hand, is how it feels to experience time. If you sat and watched the hour hand turn from 6 to 7, then 7 to 8, and so on and on and on, you can be sure that over some intervals the hand will seem to run and over others it will swim through glue. If we were to imagine that both lived time and clock time were to be chopped up into their atomic units - each a 'frame' of the occurrent, or present moment - clock time would be divided evenly, sliced neatly into equal intervals. Lived time, however, is the subjective experience of each passing moment. It seems to resist this neat slicing; it feels variable and rich, and it stretches and compresses based on our emotional state, attention, and the events we are experiencing.

It is this subjective perception of time that Langer builds upon when discussing 'virtual time' in music. Langer proposes that musical 'motion' is the essence of music, and also introduces it as the point of origin for her 'virtual time' [Langer (1942, p. 107)]. Music motion is not a technical thing; It is the tone, colour, and rhythm of a piece - how notes seem to flow upwards and downwards towards points of rest or exclamatory peaks, the

"—fast movement or slow, stop, attack, rising melody, widening or closing harmony, crowding chords and flowing figures" [ibid., p. 108].

It is not some physical manipulation of the air by the plucking of a string, nor just the sound bellowing out of an instrument, but a directed illusion of movement created by the notes spread over both time and a tonal hierarchy. This motion is an auditory illusion - there is no part of the physical world which you can pin down and find it hiding in. This motion is realized (like all of Langer's other theories of art) through perception. It expresses itself in the form of 'tensions', which create and resolve within the structure of the composition, directly mirroring the ebb and flow of human emotions and experiences. These tensions are not just auditory; they evoke a visceral response, engaging the listener's entire sensory and emotional apparatus.

Langer believes that - given a certain level of focus when listening - music controls and augments our perception of time. Music seems to absorb our whole awareness of time, taking us away from our ordinary 'lived time'. Langer states that musical tension fills our perception of the occurrent moment with substance that is entirely sonorous.

Music spreads out time for our direct and complete apprehension, by letting our hearing monopolize it — organize, fill, and shape it, all alone. [ibid., p. 110]

These tensions grasp our experience of the present, binding each atomic unit of our temporal experience to an atomic unit of music - this musical motion. As such, musical motion creates a 'virtual time' that is completely separate from clock time, which when attended to by a listener, stretches and warps their perception of the flow of time to match the unveiling shape of a piece. Felt rather than measured, each note or harmony alters our perception of duration and sequence.

Music makes time audible, and its form and continuity sensible [ibid., p. 110]

This injection of quality and form into each moment of perception is what makes 'virtual time' an apt reflection of 'lived time'. Lived time is inherently non-linear, each moment seeming to have a volume and breadth different from its temporal neighbours. Langer specifically uses 'lived time' to mean the temporal window from within which we sit and observe the moment-to-moment passage, the passing of the future to the past, something akin to this anchored point of view that we call the 'specious present' [Le Poidevin, (2019)]. So in presenting 'lived time' as having volume, she means that the direct experience of time is composed of subjectively 'big' or 'small' units of time [Langer (1942, p. 112)]. She declares that it is tensions that make up these small units, giving them some density or reality; These tensions can be physical— a body strained under a heavy weight, emotional— a young child enduring an hours-long photo session where they must sit still, or intellectual— the attention given to a set of math problems. The tensions found in music, whilst purely sonorous, are a reflection of the varied tensions we find in the general perception of time.

3. The Forgotten Role of Memory in Perception

While Langer's general analogy is sound, her lack of adherence to a concrete theory of time may allow us room to tell a more general story about music. As described, she seems to believe that it is differences in each occurrent moment of the continuous stream of perception that leads to the apparent non-linearity of lived time. However, she does not venture to propose or directly build off of any theory of time that explains how general, multi-modal experience is modulated by the real tensions for which musical tensions hold semblance. This undercuts her argument that 'music symbolizes lived time'. Without a more concrete definition of lived time, progress made seems to teeter on unstable foundations.

She is quoted as saying "time exists for us because we undergo tensions and their resolutions" - she believes these musical tensions fill time, and that it is because these tensions are vast in variety and form that lived time is not homogenous and simple like clock time [ibid., 112]. The lived time she is proposing is still made up of atomic units, like clock time, but it is the differentiation of these units that leads to its non-linearity. Langer also later states that the "direct experience of passage is something actual, like clock time" [ibid., p.113] It is unclear then if the non-linearity arises in the 'units' themselves or somewhere else.1

From this confusion, we can re-evaluate Langer's theory by working backwards from a more concrete definition of what it means to perceive the occurrent. Henri-Louis Bergson, a 20th century French philosopher, while acknowledged, but refuted by Langer for his 'lack of logical daring' [ibid., p. 114], believed that our consciousness illuminates and synthesizes the most recent portion of the past. Ignoring the rest of Bergson's thinking, (for brevity) it is not unreasonable to extract from it just the idea that every moment, as soon as it is perceived, is handled firstly by memory, making it a part of a continuous whole rather than a distinct, quantifiable moment. For Bergson, the present moment we consciously perceive is not a static, isolated instant. Rather, it is infused with and inseparable from our memories of the immediate past.

In examining the role of memory in the perception of the present, cognitive psychology also provides compelling evidence that memory is not merely a passive repository but actively shapes our real-time experience. Research suggests that what we perceive in the 'now' is heavily influenced by our recollections, where past experiences filter and interpret incoming information [Mitterer et al., 2009; Jaffe-Dax et al., 2023]. This idea aligns with the phenomenological perspective of philosophers like Merleau-Ponty, who argued that perception is directly influenced by memories, forming a continuous thread of experience [Merleau-Ponty, 1962].

A practical example of this can be seen in cases of individuals with amnesia, who, lacking typical memory functions, experience a fragmented and disjointed present, significantly different from the continuous flow of time experienced by those with intact memory faculties. Amnesiac Clive Wearing's case is extreme but illuminating; he lives in what has been described as a perpetual present. Due to his condition, he is unable to form new memories and has also lost a significant portion of his past memories. His perception of time is highly fragmented; he continually feels as though he is waking up for the first time every few minutes, experiencing each moment as if no prior moment had existed. His diary entries often consist of statements like "I am now really awake" repeated over and over, each entry believing it to be the first moment of consciousness. His interactions and expressions of emotion are always in the immediate, with no retention of prior emotional states or the context that might have influenced them. [Sacks, p. 23-41]

Langer seems to neglect the role of memory in the experience of time. Embedded immediately in her definition of musical time - referencing musical tensions - she states that each passing moment becomes 'unalterable fact' immediately after perception.

Musical duration is an image of what might be termed 'lived' or 'experienced' time— The passage of life that we feel as expectations become 'now,' and 'now' turns into unalterable fact [ibid., p. 109].

As discussed above, it is clear that Langer believes in an atomic unit of perception. Here she is describing this atomic unit - the passage of the future to the past. But she is ignoring the function of memory here - the present does not arrive to consciousness as a pure, uncontaminated perception, but rather as something interpenetrated by and continuous with our retained memories. The process of recollecting a memory is never just retrieval but always involves reconstructing the memory through the "lens" of our present-moment mental and emotional state. There is no 'unalterable fact' with memory, and there is no way for experience to occur directly in the infinitesimal limit of the present - experience is realized in memory.

Now that we have taken the power to change shape or quality away from the occurrent moment - we see that it is memory that actively shapes our perception of time. At each moment of listening to a piece of music, you take in new information about the 'resolutions' and 'tensions' present - this information, naturally, causes your memory of the event to update. But this updating is not just an appending to the end of an existing description, but instead a re-writing and re-ordering of large chunks of what you will later recollect. Of course, your memory is not infinite - it is constantly fighting a battle to fit a large amount of information into a small bag. The most efficient way to fit a sequence of events into the bag is not to shove it in endwise, but instead is surely something more abstract - a natural compression of moments stretched out over clock time [Friston, (2010)].

One could argue, then, that it is because memory is compressed and because the 'perceptual present' is realized through memory, that even in the present moment, the overwhelming wealth of information that you could be perceiving - the full richness of your environment - is restricted to all but a small subset. When listening to a piece of music, it is through your memory that a particular tension is brought forward out of the "dense fabric of concurrent tensions" that Langer describes music as. Memory serves to both imbue the 'perceptual present' with quality and form - Langer's 'volume', as well as recollection with a sense of non-linearity. It seems to be that this function of memory is what leads to the qualitative difference between clock time and lived time. Langer's 'musical tensions' are neither directly stretching nor warping the 'occurrent window' of perception as if they were patterned slices of a bar of music segregated by saran wrap. Instead, memory seems to be the origin of the inherent non-linearity of 'lived time'.

4. Conclusion

Whilst it is not that memory alone shapes our perception of time, it seems that its role is at least missing from Langer's derivation of 'virtual time'. It's not that the place of memory in perception is completely incongruent with Langer's central theory of music, but that a clearer distinction between it and her theories of poetry and narration - which she described as providing the "semblance of memory", the symbolic transformation of past experiences into story form - may be needed. It may also be true that music still is representative of lived time. If so, it would be worth expanding on how expectation and prediction, both functions of memory interacting with consciousness, fit into Langer's theory of time and music.

4.1 Citations

Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? - Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11 (2), 127–138. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2787

Jaffe-Dax, S., Potter, C. E., Leung, T. S., Emberson, L. L., & Lew-Williams, C. (2023). The Influence of Memory on Visual Perception in Infants, Children, and Adults. Cognitive science, 47(11), e13381. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13381

Langer, S. K. (1942). Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. Harvard University Press.

Le Poidevin, R. (2019). The experience and perception of time. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/time-experience/

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1945). Phenomenology of perception. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: The Humanities Press. Edited by Donald A. Landes.

Mitterer, Holger & Horschig, Jörn M. & Müsseler, Jochen & Majid, Asifa. (2009). The Influence of Memory on Perception: It's Not What Things Look Like, It's What You Call Them. Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, 35, 1557-62. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017019

Sacks, O. (1985). The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales. Summit Books. 23-41.