What is Musical Time?

When asked the question of what musical time is and what it entails, many might use ‘tempo’ as a contributing word to aid the definition. They may give the traditional definition of tempo as being the pace or speed of any given music. I too, will use the word tempo, however I do not refer to it in the conventional sense of measuring the pace of a song, but rather how it measures the pace that our lives seem to continue at while we listen to music. Different songs have the ability to generate distinctive emotions. In return, these emotions have the power to seemingly alter ones sense of time. For example, fast paced music conveys energy that can cause our brains to, in a sense, lose track of time and therefore cause time to fly by. Similarly, music that triggers extreme emotion such as loss and heartbreak can prompt our thought process to slow down and dwell on the song at hand. This can give our minds the impression that time is passing at a much slower rate.  Through these examples, it becomes clear that music has an innate ability to influence our minds regarding how we process periods of time.