A time scale specifies divisions (scale) of time. // Look up scale in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A pocket watch, a common timekeeping device. ...

• A time standard is a specification of either the rate at which time passes, or points in time, or both.
• A duration is a quantity of time.
• A rhythm is a temporal pattern of events, especially in music.
• The geological time scale divides up the history of the Earth into scientifically meaningful periods.

There is also a wiki, called WikiTimeScale, which deals with historic events displayed on a user-defined time scale. A time scale specifies divisions of time. ... A duration is an amount of time or a particular time interval. ... // Rhythm (Greek ρυθμός = tempo) is the variation of the duration of sounds or other events over time. ... Music is a form of expression in the medium of time using the structures of tones and silence. ... The table and timeline of geologic periods presented here is in accordance with the dates and nomenclature proposed by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. ... The history of the World is human history from the dawn of humanity to the present. ... A wiki (IPA: <wee-kee> or <wick-ey>[1]) is a type of website that allows users to add, remove, or otherwise edit and change most content very quickly and easily, sometimes without the need for registration. ... WikiTimeScale is a 2006 established Wiki whose purpose is to graphically illustrate the events of history in a clear and good arranged way. ...

Musical time scales

In music, Curtis Roads (2001, p.3-4) distinguishes nine time scales of music: Music is a form of expression in the medium of time using the structures of tones and silence. ... Curtis Roads is a composer of electronic and electroacoustic music specializing in granular and pulsar synthesis, author, and computer programmer. ...

1. Infinite: literally infinite, such as the length of sine waves in classical Fourier analysis,
2. Supra: months, years, decades, and centuries; everything above the level of
3. Macro: "overall musical architecture or form" or the level of the individual piece; minutes, hours, or even days,
4. Meso: "Divisions of form" including movements, sections, phrases; seconds and minutes,
5. Sound object (Schaeffer 1959, 1977): "a basic unit of musical structure" and a generalization of note (Xenakis' ministructural time scale); fraction of a second to several seconds,
6. Micro: "sound particles" (see granular synthesis) down to the threshold of audible perception; thousands to millionths of seconds,
7. Sample: sample (music), measured as are samples in millionths of a second or microseconds,
8. Subsample: changes "too brief to properly recorded or perceived", billionths of a second, nanosecond, or less, and
9. Infinitesimal: literally "infinitely brief" such as delta functions.

Music may, however, exist "outside" of time when structured through "principles whose defnitions does not imply a temporal order", including scales and many other precompositional techniques, musical instruments, and aleatoric music. Examples such as sound installations in which the order of the sound is determined by, for example, a listeners movement through the system, are thus placed in time. (ibid, p.38) Infinity is a word carrying a number of different meanings in mathematics, philosophy, theology and everyday life. ... In trigonometry, an ideal sine wave is a waveform whose graph is identical to the generalized sine function y = Asin[ω(x − α)] + C, where A is the amplitude, ω is the angular frequency (2π/P where P is the wavelength), α is the phase shift, and C is the... Harmonic analysis is the branch of mathematics which studies the representation of functions or signals as the superposition of basic waves. ... The month is a unit of time, used with calendars, which is approximately as long as some natural period related to the motion of the Moon. ... A year is the time between two recurrences of an event related to the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. ... This is a list of decades which have articles with more information about them. ... This page is about centuries as units of time. ... A musical piece is a composed work of music that is intended for performance or reproduction (for recorded works) and has a creator. ... A minute is a unit of time equal to 1/60th of an hour and to 60 seconds. ... The hour (symbol: h) is a unit of time. ... Water, Rabbit, and Deer: three of the 20 day symbols in the Aztec calendar, from the Aztec Sun Stone. ... In music, a movement is a large division of a larger composition or musical form. ... Section can be: A cross section (in the common sense or the physics sense) In mathematics: A conic section A section of a fiber bundle or sheaf A Caesarean section In UK law, Section 28 In the fictional Star Trek universe, Section 31 A military unit A section (land) is... In music a phrase is a section of music that is relatively self contained and coherent over a medium time scale. ... Look up second in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Microsound includes all sounds on the time scale shorter than musical notes, the sound object time scale, and longer than the sample time scale. ... Granular synthesis is a sound synthesis method that operates on the microsound time scale. ... In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or element of a new recording. ... A microsecond is an SI unit of time equal to one millionth (10-6) of a second. ... To help compare orders of magnitude of different times this page lists times between 10−9 seconds and 10−8 seconds (1 nanosecond and 10 nanoseconds) See also times of other orders of magnitude. ... In mathematics, an infinitesimal, or infinitely small number, is a number that is smaller in absolute value than any positive real number. ... The Dirac delta function, introduced by Paul Dirac, can be informally thought of as a function δ(x) that has the value of infinity for x = 0, the value zero elsewhere, and a total integral of one. ... In music, a scale is a set of musical notes that provides material for part or all of a musical work. ... In music, precompositional decisions are those decisions which a composer decides upon before or while beginning to create a composition. ... Aleatoric (or aleatory) music or composition, is music where some element of the composition is left to chance. ...

Source

• Roads, Curtis (2001). Microsound. MIT. ISBN 0262182157.