Music Therapy Today - World Federation of Music Therapy

Fachner, J. (2006) ‘Set and setting’ in an electrophysiological research paradigm on music perception under the influence of cannabis
and correlated brain function. Music Therapy Today (Online) Vol.VII (2) 333-374. available at http://musictherapyworld.net
words, if you are a musician you’re going to play the thing the
way it is printed on a sheet. But if you’re using marihuana, you’re
going to work in about as twice as much music in-between the
first note and the second note. That’s what made jazz musicians.
The idea that they could jazz things up, lighten them up...” (Sloman,
1998, p.146/147).
There is a feeling of time being stretched or expanded or perceived as
slowed down or sped up. 95% of 151 participants of Charles Tart’s study
“On Being Stoned” agreed to the following statement: “Time passes very
slowly; things go on for the longest time (e.g. one side of a record seems
to play for hours)” (C. Tart, 1971). In most experiments, stoned subjects
failed to reproduce a correct metric counting of time intervals, and tended
to expand the estimated units. Jones reported that a 15 second time inter-
val was expanded to a mean of 16.7 seconds, with deviation up to 19 sec-
onds estimated under the influence of oral THC, while being counted
correctly in normal state (Jones & Stone, 1970). A reverse relationship
also occurs. Melges declared a speeding-up of the inner clock as respon-
sible for expanded and slowed perception of chronological time and for
producing temporal disintegration failures. “A subject becomes less able
to integrate past, present and future, his awareness becomes more con-
centrated on present events; these instances, in turn, are experienced as
prolonged or timeless when they appear isolated from the continual pro-
gression of time” Melges concluded (Melges et al., 1971, p.566). This
reminds of some of the counter-culture focus ideas on the ‘here and now’
feeling.
However, all kinds of processes occur in time. We are ‘patterned frequen-
cies in a matrix of time’ improvising our identity in the personal set and
setting of situations we’re in, as David Aldridge (1989) has proposed. In
the experience of time as kairos, time structures are connected to the per-
sonal time. Time as chronos is connected to processes concerned with
defined geographical and societal agreements. Kairological time allows a
Results and discussion 354