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In Music , Curtis Roads (2001, p.3-4) distinguishes nine Time Scale s of music:
#Infinite: literally Infinite , such as the length of Sine Wave s in classical Fourier Analysis ,
#Supra: Month s, Year s, Decade s, and Centuries ; everything above the level of
#Macro: "overall musical architecture or form" or the level of the individual Piece ; Minute s, Hour s, or even Day s,
#Meso: "Divisions of form" including Movement s, Section s, Phrases ; Second s and minutes,
#Sound object (Schaeffer 1959, 1977): "a basic unit of musical structure" and a generalization of Note (Xenakis' ministructural time scale); fraction of a second to several seconds,
#) down to the threshold of audible perception; thousands to millionths of seconds,
#Sample: Sample (music) , measured as are samples in millionths of a second or Microsecond s,
#Subsample: changes "too brief to properly recorded or perceived", billionths of a second, Nanosecond , or less, and
#Infinitesimal: literally " Infinitely Brief " such as Delta Function s.

Music may, however, exist "outside" of time when structured through "principles whose defnitions does not imply a temporal order", including Scales and many other Precompositional techniques, musical instruments, and Aleatoric Music . Examples such as sound installations in which the order of the sound is determined by, for example, a listeners movement through the system, are thus placed in time. (ibid, p.38)

See also: Duration , Rhythm , Timescapes , and Geologic Timescale .

There is also a Wiki , called WikiTimeScale , which deals with historic events displayed on a user-defined time scale.


SOURCE

  • Roads, Curtis (2001). ''Microsound''. MIT. ISBN 0262182157.