Model of “unconscious” duration experience while listen to music and noise
Yoichi Ando, Tamao Ando

In daily life, we usually pay no attention to time except for special situations such as going on a trip and attending one’s office in the morning, so that such an unconscious sense of time is discussed here. To ensure that subjects provided information on an “unconscious” duration experience without any attention to time, they were not acquainted with the real purpose of this experiment. Subjective preference judgment of the sound field was conduced as a masker investigation in parallel in the duration experiment. After subjective preference judgment for sound field, an experiment (with 102 university students as subjects) concerning an impression of time duration presentations of two different pieces of music was conducted. Of the eighty subjects who judged a slow “quiet” music piece (music A; period: 9.26 s) as more preferable than a fast “active” music piece (music B; period: 6.26 s), 70-% of rated the duration of music A as longer than it’s the time ratio (1.48, i.e., the ratio: time of music A to time of music B), p < 0.01. According to the model of duration experience, the clock pulses generated by endogenous oscillators and received at receptors in the brain might be more suppressed in the case of the active music than in the case of the quiet music as well as environmental noise around 75 dBA.

Key words: “unconscious” duration experience, sound stimuli, model of duration experience, endogenous oscillators, a number of pulse integrated, suppression by external stimuli, receptor