Classification of Time

 

This is the last day of the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It is a good time to spend even more time thinking about time.

There are different kinds of clocks, “audio” clocks--time that we detect with pulsed sound;, or patterned silences, “vision” clocks--time we detect with vision (sometimes accompanied by sound), body clocks (embodied time), and “emotional” clocks, an internal sense of time--a psychological time or "mood".

Audio Clocks

Classification of color is one of the human universals. It is one of the primary universals that are used when making visual art. But it can also be used in other domains and is a fixture in music.

Seconds, minutes, days, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, epochs--are all forms of time classification. In music, we can classify time with beat subdivisions--either in the form of standard musical notation, but also in the form of samples, and quantization, such as MIDI clocks or voltage-controlled clocks or clock generators.

In most music, rhythms are seldom subdivided into more than three levels. In pop music, the main pulse is the quarter note, which is only subdivided twice into eighth notes (including triplets) and sixteenth notes (including triplets). Any thirty-second notes would be in the form of grace notes or flams. In 2/2 or “cut time”, the main pulse is the half note and is similarly cut into quarter notes and eighth notes--with the sixteenth notes treated the same way as note decorations.

The clocks used in electronic musical instruments can vary widely. I have an old sequencer that I bought in 1987 and still use it on some things. I find that when I use it with other synthesizers/sequencers and software DAWS, the old electronics with the old clocks will not synchronize and will quickly drift. In fact, the pre-90s-era clocks have irregular pulses, most likely having to do with voltage “arrhythmia”. In this sense, those voltage irregularities are really a form of “human feel”, using the dual metaphor of heart arrhythmia and electrical arrhythmia--interestingly both regulated by electrical impulses.

I have discovered over time that there are different kinds of “human feel” which are rhythmically acceptable. A perfect example of human feel is “swing”. If proceeding from beat to beat is like a pendulum swing, irregularities in the speed (or “eurhythmics”) of the swing is a natural form of human feel. However, human feel can also be full of errors. Errors definitely sound like errors compared to a swing-feel foundation. In rock music, you can either use the rigid unforgiving clock-like foundation, or you can swing it, using the pendulum metaphor. You think of pendulums as being a kind of clock, but pendulum swings, as in jazz swing, are naturally unequal in a consistently equal way. This means that all the players can make their own errors in detecting the pulse in the flow of time, but it all equals out in a pleasing way. In rigid temporal foundations, the errors are easy to hear, and are more susceptible to fluctuations in embodied time--and psychological or emotional time--which can affect how the body will execute rhythms. They are also easier to see when you look at the audio waveforms: When I combine electronic instruments, drum loops, and manually-played acoustic instruments, the timing errors are easy to see, hear, and feel. However, with practice, a player can become more rhythmically exacting. This requires continuous practice to maintain, and not many have the discipline to do this. This is why there is such a glut of electronic dance music: Playing music is hard--and it is easier to admit that it is by playing music that doesn't require much effort.

Visual Clocks

We can use the temporal elements in making visual art by setting up artificial constraints--such as creating a time limit on which a piece is created. For example, you could set the constraint of making a painting in five days or in X-number of hours. As time started to run out, decisions would need to be made and the work would need to be finalized. This is a form of time classification in a domain in which time is hardly ever considered: A painting takes as long as it takes, even if it is years or even decades. Visual art works best when it doesn't have time constraints, because creativity, and the moods and emotions involved, rely on being perfectly timed by The Muse.

Time is also either Apollonian (as in the example of creating a painting in 5 days), and Dionysian in that the making of the painting relies on internal or psychological time.

It is remarkable that a lot of the classic recordings that we enjoy were made on the clock of booked studio time. It is also remarkable that many of the Gilmour-era Pink Floyd albums, such as Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall were made in their own studio, and the music was made in the temporal space of a painting. This is why they are what they are because they took their Time--a common cosmic theme in Floyd.

We can also look at civilization as a form of "emotional art form" (not strictly tethered to time, and running in epochal time), or we can take a more top-down, “authoritarian” approach. In music, time is strictly "authoritarian" because by and large, we like things to be synchronized in time. (At least I do). Rap and Hip-Hop use more of a loose approach to tempo and rhythm, with a “roving” bar line--or no bar line. It is more like language than music, and follows its natural contours--unlike lots of lyric writing which is adjusted to syllabic stresses.

Frame Rates

When you watch a music video (or do the editing on one), the beat of the cuts also relies on the superimposition of the “clock of the eye” (saccades) and the tempo of the music. One becomes more aware of this interplay when you are doing the editing. Visually, there are also sets of expectations that have to do with the mood, pace of the motion, color, tints, luminance, and so on. Once visuals are used with sound and music, expectations are completely changed. It's no longer music in its pure sense. What I have found interesting is that when I put in cut points I usually close my eyes because it blocks out the interference (or “beat frequency”) between the two. In anything that's audio-visual, removing one of them for an A-B comparison is sometimes necessary so as to find the best combination between the two. Also, omitting one of them engages the imagination, whereas both of them together may shut down imagination.

A piece of art that I still love to this day is The Top-Grossing Film of All Time in which film frames from Titanic are arranged horizontally in rows from beginning to end. From a distance, we see only color and luminance, which can be associated with the flow of the drama. If you did this with films that had car chases, they'd all be at about the same level on the Y-axis as a bright spot because they are typically done in bright sunlight.

Planetary Time

On Mars, a second is the same as a second on Earth. Therefore, making music on Mars would have the same temporal foundations by subdividing time in the same way as beats-per-minute, and frames-per-second for video/animation. So there is a universal sense of time (as a formalized classification), which is much different than internal states of time which rely on internal states of mind. But the days, months, years, and decades are different on Mars because its rotation is slightly longer than Earth’s rotation.

If we were to consider conjunctions between Earth and Mars, we would sometimes have conjunctions of decades. One could probably calculate when the decades of Earth and Mars would be in sync and celebrate cosmic New Year's and decadal celebrations.

Happy New Decade--the Fin de la Décennie--which has more power as psychological time more than anything else.

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Winter Clocks