Time as heard in speech and music

Abstract

THE time intervals of consequence in music range from about 50 ms, the fastest that notes may be separately fingered on the piano, to about 1 s, the tempo of slow largo. Poetry is customarily recited with beats every 600-800 ms, and the semi-isochronous stresses of speech rhythm are, according to Classe, of the order of 600 ms apart1. We take pride in the accuracy with which we can produce and appreciate these intervals or deviate from them at will. That we require an auditory information storage of brief duration, briefer than that customarily named short-term memory, is known, Neisser calling it echoic memory2; but, as distinct from our other kinds of memory which memorise events in rank order of occurrence only, what our talent for music and speech shows is that in this brief storage we possess, with a working range of a second or so, a comprehension of those things we have just heard, arranged quite accurately in true time relationship. © 1974 Nature Publishing Group.