Changes in the representation of space and time while listening to music

Abstract

Music is known to alter people's ordinary experience of space and time. Not only does this challenge the concept of invariant space and time tacitly assumed in psychology but it may also help us understand how music works and how music can be understood as an embodied experience. Yet research about these alterations is in its infancy. This review is intended to delineate a future research agenda. We review experimental evidence and subjective reports of the influence of music on the representation of space and time and present prominent approaches to explaining these effects. We discuss the role of absorption and altered states of consciousness and their associated changes in attention and neurophysiological processes, as well as prominent models of human time processing and time experience. After integrating the reviewed research, we conclude that research on the influence of music on the representation of space and time is still quite inconclusive but that integrating the different approaches could lead to a better understanding of the observed effects. We also provide a working model that integrates a large part of the evidence and theories. Several suggestions for further research in both music psychology and cognitive psychology are outlined.