Temporal order of musical keys and subjective estimates of time

The aim of this study was to observe the influence of the temporal order of musical keys involved in sudden modulations, which implies compositional developments in clockwise and counterclockwise directions of the circle of fifths, on subjective time estimations. Seventy-five undergraduate students from Universidade de Ribeirão Preto participated in this experiment, which consisted of listening to a modulating musical stimulus and retrospectively reproducing the duration with the aid of a stopwatch. The results showed that reverse sudden tonal modulation in the counterclockwise direction or, for instance, the temporal order from the original key of A-major to the arrival at the destination key of C-major, elicited shorter time estimations than the clockwise direction or, for instance, the temporal order from original key of C-major to the arrival at the destination key of A-major. These data were interpreted using the Expected Development Fraction model that describes the development of expectations when an inter-key distance is traversed during a certain time interval. This expected development is longer than the perceived duration, leading to the underestimation of time.