Time estimation through ambient soundscape

Introduction

For listeners, temporal awareness appears to be lessened while listening to ambient music. Unlike most other music genres where the listener has several indicators of the movement of time such as the beat being easily noticeable and the rhythm is highly obvious, with ambient music we have less ability to state accurately how much time has passed. This study will examines how accurately subjects can estimate time through an ambient soundscape. According to the hypothesis, the listeners will not estimate, accurately, the time that has passed.

Method

i. Participants: Seven volunteers, with no musical background, were employed for this task. Each in turn were asked to listen to an ambient soundscape that I created. The participants were blindfolded in order to avoid exposure to any other stimuli that could indicate the passage of time.

ii. Stimulus: The aforementioned ambient soundscape was made in Ableton Live. It consisted of a simple drone created with two basic waves, secondly a reverberation was added in order to make sound more pleasant. Interspersed through the track, 8 smooth gong-like attacks were placed.

Table 1. Left column: Events' position in the track. Right column: Track duration.

iii. Procedure:

(a) The participants were provided with the following instructions: “You’ll be listening to an ambient track. Interspersed through the track will be several gong-like sounds. When these occur, try to approximate how much time has passed since the beginning of the track.”. Following the listening to the stimulus, the participants are asked to answer the following questions:

How long do you think the piece lasted?
When do you think the 1st attack happened?
When do you think the 2nd attack happened?
When do you think the 3rd attack happened?
When do you think the 4th attack happened?
When do you think the 5th attack happened?
When do you think the 6th attack happened?
When do you think the 7th attack happened?
When do you think the 8th attack happened?
When did you lose track (if you did)?
Do you think that you are a competitive person?

(b) Preliminary tests were performed via employing 4 additional participants in order to finalise the questions. As a result, the question "Do you think that you are a competitive person?" was added. Knowing the personalities of the four additional participants, it was a factor I felt could act as an important element in the explanation of their results. While it's not easy to count a beat accurately while listening to such stimulus, competitiveness seemed to be a factor which demonstrated a bias in the results.

Furthermore, the question "When did you lose track (if you did)?", was added in order to narrow down the results. This was included in the main test as it became apparent during the preliminary tests that the less competitive participants became lost in the track and were unable to define both when the attacks occurred or even how many.

Results

Starting with the estimation of the duration of the entire, track the results are ambiguous. Two of the participants underestimated it, three of them overestimated it and two estimated the duration almost precisely. It's noteworthy that the estimations that were closer to the actual duration of the track belong to the more competitive participants.

Table 2. Estimation of the total duration of the the track.

Concerning the estimations of the each event's timing, overall it became clear that as the track progresses, they appear to be less and less accurate.

Figure 1. All the estimations of the event's timing (Click to enlarge)

The preliminary tests suggested that the data of the first four attacks was more credible and reliable. The data showed that after the first four attacks, the participants grew less and less sure of their answers to the point of guesswork by attack number eight.

For the first event, the answers of participants seem to agree within a range of +/- 5 seconds, while only one of them overestimated the first event’s position outside of the +/-5 second range.

For the second event, the answers of participants seem to widen in terms of range. The range of the second event became evident as within +/- 15 seconds, while two of them overestimated its position outside of the +/- 15 seconds.

For the third event, the answers of the participants didn’t widen further than the range +/- 15. However, the participants estimated that the third attack occurred earlier than its actual timing and it is noteworthy that the competitive participants estimated the position of the third attack almost exactly one minute after their second attack estimation.

For the fourth event, the answers of the participants seem to widen to the range of +/- 25 seconds. While one of the participants overestimated the position of the attack.

Figure 2. All the estimations of the first four events (Click to enlarge)

Conclusion

Confirming the hypothesis, the results suggest that an ambient soundscape can affect our time awareness. As the track progresses, it is harder to estimate how much time has passed since the beginning of the track. This result could be connected to memory as the majority of the participants were unable to remember where the attacks occurred, approximately from the middle of the track.

However, it appears that competitive participants could estimate time more precisely than the less competitive ones. Additionally, those participants were also able to estimate more accurately the position of the last attack compared to their estimation about the end of the track.

Furthermore, the number of the participants was small, so we can't say that the conclusions are safe. They confirm the hypothesis and they suggest an obvious connection to memory, probably because there was not clear indication of a structure apart from the starting and the ending point.

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