ABSTRACT
Musicians have been remarkably slow to assume what would seem even a decent level of interest in time; it is, more than they apparently realize, their proper concern. With a minimum latent period of 30-70 milliseconds, the ear is far better suited to the discrimination of temporal successions than the eye, with a latent period of 70-110 milliseconds. The latent period measures only the time necessary for a signal to reach the proper threshold, the necessary strength for triggering a response. Below this point, the nervous system will fail in detection. The difference in capacity of the ear and the eye for detecting discontinuities is more striking: a ten-millisecond gap is recognized by the ear, but another factor of ten is necessary before the eye achieves a similar impression. As the early French experimenter Guyau noted:
Thus music-streams of events apprehended aurally-is preeminently the temporal art.
