
This is the third article in our series, Music, Time and Long-term Thinking. Two previous articles explored long-term thinking in several musical domains, with focus on three artists: Brian Eno, John Cage and Jem Finer. For this third entry, we open our field of interest to broadly survey projects with unique temporal approaches.
One of the easiest ways to explore temporality through music is to simply slow it down. Just as we would seem incredibly slow to a hummingbird, slowed-down recordings can make us feel like the world is slowing down, each moment resonating with new intensity.

Along these lines, Norwegian composer Leif Inge has taken Beethoven’s 9th symphony and stretched it to 24 hours in length while maintaining the original pitch. In 02004, the piece was presented as a “once-in-a-lifetime all-night pajamas-please sleep-over concert-event” at San Francisco’s 964 Natoma, organized by Member Aaron Ximm. As Ximm describes it:
The result is a remarkable remaking of Beethoven as massive soundscape: a piece in which familiar motifs develop twenty times more slowly than we’re used to, at times lovely, at times overwhelming. It is the best-known symphony in the world transformed: transformed into a dramatic and haunting and hypnotizing soundscape that passes like clouds over a vast landscape.
A meme from 02010 captures this same effect with a pop song. A user on Reddit posted a link to a recording he’d created of Justin Bieber’s “U Smile” slowed down 800%. The result was shared virally across the internet for the next several days.
The original Soundcloud post of the recording by Shamantis has been deleted, but remnants still exist on YouTube.
A Soundcloud user by the name of PsychicWhoosh captures the unnerving beauty of this piece in a comment on the track:
This thing is having a profound impact on my view of the universe at the moment, that here, hidden in this crappy, commercial pop song is a piece of music so transcendent in its cosmic beauty, it is moving me to heights of spiritual ecstasy. It was there all along, like a cipher hiding in plain sight which no one knew needed decoding. It simply needed to be tuned to the right frequency, to be tracked along the proper coordinates of time.
In contrast to dramatically slowing a recording down and extending its length, artists have also explored the possibilities of repeating short recordings over and over. The history of looping in modern composing is a story of the accidental beauty of technological imperfection and decay. In 01965, composer Steve Reich recorded a preacher in Union Square, declaring “It’s gonna rain.” While attempting to start a second loop halfway through the first recording, Reich found that the technology was imperfect, creating what is known as a phase shift.

The idea behind a phase shift is that two identical loops start off in sync, and then over time one drifts, creating a doubling effect. As the second loop shifts further, the loops conflict more and more, until their waveforms are exactly opposite. From this point the second loop continues its shift and eventually catches back up with the first loop, bringing the loops back into sync and completing the process.
Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain.”
While originally unintentional, Reich liked the sound of the phase shift, and the piece “It’s Gonna Rain” became Reich’s landmark composition and a significant contribution to minimalism and process music. Brian Eno, in a Long Now lecture, cited “It’s Gonna Rain” as his first experience with minimalism and the genre that would come to be known as ambient music.

Just a few years after Reich’s creative accident, a young composer named Alvin Lucier was also experimenting with looping. The premise was simple — Lucier recorded himself reading a paragraph of text while sitting in a room:
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.