Performing Time Synchrony and Temporal Flow in Music and Dance

Music and dance can change our sense of time. Both rely on synchronizing our attention and actions with sounds and with other people, both involve memory and expectation, and both can give rise to experiences of flow and pleasure.

Performing Time explores our experience of time in dance and music, from the perspectives of performers and audiences, and informed by the most recent research in dance science, musicology, neuroscience, and psychology. It includes discussions of tempo and pacing, coordination and synchrony, the performer's experience of time, audiences' temporal expectations, the effect of extreme slowness, and our individual versus collective senses of time. At its core, the book addresses how time and temporality in music and dance relate to current psychological and neuroscientific theories as well as to the aesthetic aims of composers, choreographers and performers.

Bringing together new research on rhythm, time and temporality in both music and dance in one volume, the book contains overview chapters on the state of the art from leading researchers on topics ranging from the psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of musical time to embodied timing in dance. In addition, numerous case studies regarding our temporal experience of music and dance are provided in shorter focus chapters, with their implications for further scientific study and artistic enquiry.

Performing Time is an invaluable and comprehensive resource for students, researchers, educators, and artists alike, and for any reader interested in how the performing arts construct and play with time in our minds and bodies.

Some chapters in this title are open access and available under the terms of a [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International] licence.

Clemens Wollner, Institute of Systematic Musicology Universität Hamburg,Justin London, Department of Music Carleton College

Clemens Wöllner is Professor of Systematic Musicology at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He has published widely on timing in perception and performance, expressiveness, attention and movement in music and beyond. His long-term research project “Slow Motion: Transformation of Musical Time in Perception and Performance” has been awarded a grant from the European Union. He is President of the German Society for Music Psychology, and serves in the boards of leading journals in the field.


Justin London is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Music, Cognitive Science, and the Humanities at Carleton College (USA). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania where he worked with Leonard Meyer. His research interests include rhythm and timing in non-western music, beat and tempo perception, sensorimotor synchronization and joint action, and musical aesthetics. He has served as President of the Society for Music Theory (2007-2009) and President of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (2016-2018).

0. Introduction to Performing Time, Wöllner & London
1. Time experiences in dance, Bettina Bläsing
2. Varieties of musical temporality, Mariusz Kozak
3. Psychological and neuroscientific foundations of rhythms and timing, Keith Doelling, Sophie Herbst, Luc Arnal & Virginie van Wassenhove
4. The psychological underpinnings of feelings of the passage of time, Sylvie Droit-Volet & Natalia Martinelli
5. What is musical tempo?, Justin London
6. Telling time: Dancers, dancemakers, and audience members, Renee Conroy
7. Preferred tempo and its relation to personal sense of time and temporal flow, Molly Henry & Sonja Kotz
8. Time through the magnifying glass of slowness: a case study in Myriam Gourfink's choreography, Coline Joufflineau
9. Standing still together: Reflections on a one-year-long exploration of human micromotion, Alexander Jensenius
10. Spontaneous motor tempo: A window into the inner sense of time, David Hammerschmidt
11. An embodied perspective on rhythm in music-dance genres, Mari Romarheim Haugen
12. Moving together in music and dance - features of entrainment and sensorimotor synchronisation, Guy Madison
13. Joint shaping of musical time: How togetherness emerges in music ensemble performance, Werner Goebl & Laura Bishop
14. Making time together: An exploration of participatory time-making through collective dance improvisation, Julien Laroche, Tommi Himberg & Asaf Bachrach
15. Time and synchronisation in dance movement, Birgitta Burger & Petri Toiviainen
16. Unravelling individual differences in synchronizing to the beat of music, Simone Dalla Bella
17. Shaping the beat bin in computer-based grooves, Anne Danielsen
18. The 'synchrony effect' in dance: how rhythmic scaffolding and vision facilitate social cohesion, Matthew H. Woolhouse
19. Changes in psychological time when attending to different temporal structures in music, Clemens Wöllner
20. Expressive timing in music and dance interactions: a dynamic perspective, Pieter-Jan Maes & Marc Leman
21. Temporal aspects of musical expectancy and creativity in improvisation: A review of recent neuroscientific studies and an updated model, Psyche Loui
22. Experiences of time in boring dance, Anna Pakes
23. Evaluating the psychological reality of alternate temporalities in contemporary music: Empirical case studies of Gérard Grisey's Vortex Temporum, Jason Noble, Tanor Bonin, Roger Dean & Stephen McAdams
24. Measuring experienced time while listening to music, Kristina Knowles & Richard Ashley
25. The experience of musical groove: body movement, pleasure, and social bonding, Jan Stupacher, Michael Hove & Peter Vuust
26. Embodied time: what the psychology and neuroscience of time can learn from the performing arts, Marc Wittmann
27. Learning to feel the time: Reflections of a percussionist, Russell Hartenberger
28. Performing and feeling time in contemporary dance, Henry Daniel, Justin London
29. Music is a unique artform because of the temporal aspect, Kent Nagano, Clemens Wöllner
30. Timing, tempo and rhythm: Evidence from the laboratory and the concert stage, Stewart Copeland & Daniel Levitin