Exploring time interval estimation for familiar and unfamiliar musical pieces

Subjective time perception is a complex phenomenon that normally involves interaction of different sensory modalities, as well as cognitive factors [15]. Music perception is another fascinating process that involves hierarchically distributed brain circuitry, implementing prediction-based coding [7] in a highly context-dependent way. We hypothesize that familiarity of a music piece interacts with the brain's predictive mechanisms [6] and therefore may influence subjective time perception. In this context, if the perceived time duration reflects brain's effort spent for a tune's progression prediction, then familiar tunes should reduce the subjectively perceived time. At the same time, if a memory trace left by the tune affects the temporal judgement, the familiar and the most recent tune should be perceived as longer when compared to the unfamiliar and not so recently presented one.