Time

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Before I could explain ‘time’ to someone else, I literally had to look it up myself as although I understand the concept of time, putting it into words is a whole different challenge since you can’t actually see, hear, smell, taste, or touch time. Time however, is crucial to all the senses as they all exist within … or better yet, they are all experienced over time.

Without getting into technical details that I don’t understand myself, I’ll describe time as a way to measure an event as an occurrence in the present, the past, or the future.

The units of measurement of time (seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, seasons etc) are man-made in that someone decided a very long time ago to name these events for the purpose of using them as a measurement of time. I’m guessing that the changing of seasons, or the change from day to night occurred consistently enough to be used as a reference. A year was probably the longest most obvious period in which a pattern could be observed although we do know of bigger periods such as decades, generations, ages etc. 

Of course there’s a lot more detail to this including how the planets rotate around the sun or on their axis etc. The measurement of time however can also be subdivided into infinitely smaller portions that are even too quick for us to even notice. With the introduction of the 24hour clock to represent the subdivisions of a full day, we have a way to understand what it means to practice for an hour or to listen to a 3 minute song for example. In music however, it’s a 3 minute period, the length of a popular song, that we study except we don’t really measure it in terms of minutes or seconds (sort of) unless music is being performed as part of a backing track to a movie or visual event that is measured using the standard time units of measurement.

Music has it’s own unit of measurement and it is based on beats over a period of one minute, which is simply called “beats per minute” or BPM. The standard units of time in music are usually only used when we are referring to a specific part of a recorded or finalized piece of music. Time itself is mostly used once a piece of music has been recorded and is available for playback where someone (especially non musicians) can say … “I like/dislike what occurs at the 2 minutes mark in the song” … just as they might say, “I like the song playing 30 minutes into the movie”. In these situations, you can’t refer someone to measure 14 or to beat 532.

Time is the easiest way to communicate a location within a song for non musicians. That being said, if you are communicating with band members, you would probably refer to the second verse, or to measure 26 so that they can go directly to the point in question instead of trying to figure out what minute or second you are referring to.