§ learning · vol.01
other people have been measuring duration by sense for a long time.
Where the idea comes from — philosophy, music, and the horology of clocks made of flame and smoke. Every link here was opened and read, not just pinged.
§ 01
duration as an idea
philosophy
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Bergson · 1889, trans. Pogson 1910
Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness
gutenberg.org/ebooks/56852 · full text, public domain
The source of durée: the argument that lived time is a continuous flow, and that measuring it turns it into something else — space, laid out in a line.
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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Henri Bergson
plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson
A way into durée and Bergson's quarrel with clock time that is shorter than the book.
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Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Phenomenology and Time-Consciousness
Husserl on retention and protention: the present as a span that holds a little of what has just gone and leans into what is about to arrive.
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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Temporal Consciousness
plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-temporal
The wider debate about how a present that has no duration can nonetheless feel like it lasts.
§ 02
duration you can hear
music
Two composers who made the passage of time the subject rather than the container. Both are direct ancestors of the timer's audible modes.
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Reich · 1967
Piano Phase, for two pianos or two marimbas
universaledition.com · publisher's work page
Two players hold the same figure while one slides gradually ahead. Nothing is added; the structure is entirely the drift between them.
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Reich
Composer catalogue
boosey.com/composer/Steve Reich
The rest of the phase pieces, and the tape works that led to them.
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Basinski · 2002–2003
The Disintegration Loops
williambasinski.bandcamp.com · artist's own page
Twenty-year-old tape loops were transferred to digital and allowed to play until the coating fell off the backing. The recording is the decay, so the clock is the medium itself.
§ 03
clocks of flame and scent
horology
Measuring an interval by something you smell or watch burn is not a novelty. It is one of the older families of timekeeper, and it is the lineage the physical objects in this house belong to.
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Bedini · 1963
The Scent of Time: A Study of the Use of Fire and Incense for Time Measurement in Oriental Countries
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 53, no. 5, p. 1 · doi:10.2307/1005923
The standard monograph on incense timekeeping, including seals and trails built so that a change of scent marks the passing of a named interval.
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Mogford · 2021
Candle in the Wind: Weather and the Alfredian Candle Clock
Medieval Ecocriticisms, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 45–64 · doi:10.32773/lgtg6170 · open access
On the candle clock attributed to Alfred, and on the draughts and weather that made a flame an unreliable instrument — an honest account of the failure mode.
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Antiquarian Horological Society
Society and journal
Where the scholarship on early timekeepers is still published.
§ 04
how clock time became uniform
history
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Dohrn-van Rossum · 1996
History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders
University of Chicago Press, trans. Thomas Dunlap · archive.org · lending copy
How the equal hour beat the unequal one, and what changed in ordinary life once towns kept a single count.
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Ogle · 2015
The Global Transformation of Time, 1870–1950
Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0-674-28614-6 · hup.harvard.edu
A revisionist account of time-unification campaigns, and of how slowly and unevenly a supposedly universal grid was actually laid down.
Thompson on time-discipline and Bartky on standard time sit on the evidence page, with the timing research.
a note on these links
Each link above was fetched and its contents read, because a working link is not the same as the right link. Two candidates were dropped for exactly that reason: a museum record whose address said “incense clock” turned out to hold a European horary quadrant, and a publisher page for what should have been Husserl on time-consciousness turned out to be his Formal and Transcendental Logic. Where a primary text is behind a paywall, an encyclopaedia entry is listed as an encyclopaedia entry rather than dressed up as the source.