In recent decades, music has become an increasingly common stimulus in empirical research on cognition, emotion, and time perception. While this development reflects a growing recognition of music's ecological richness, it also raises an epistemological question central to contemporary music theory and analysis: what role can music analysis play in the design and interpretation of such research? This paper argues that music analysis is not merely auxiliary to empirical studies using musical stimuli, but methodologically indispensable for understanding how music affects cognition and emotion, and for evaluating the scope and generalizability of observed effects.

This claim is developed through a case study of Colla Voce (2024) by Nick Dunston, focusing on how sustained violations of vocal expectations can give rise to uncanny experiences that may distort listeners' perception of time. Methodologically, the paper combines detailed music analysis with theoretical perspectives on the uncanny (Jentsch, 1906; Freud, 2003)and findings from empirical research on emotion and time perception. The analysis traces how the piece deploys extended vocal techniques, timbral manipulation, disrupted communicative cues, and unstable boundaries between human and artificial vocal identity. These musical features are shown to elicit an uncanny experience associated with heightened arousal and negatively valenced affect.

Building on this analysis, the paper critically reflects on whether, and under what analytical conditions, the effects of fear on time perception documented (for a review Droit-Volet, 2013) might be replicated or meaningfully tested using this musical stimulus and its induced uncanny experience. Rather than proposing direct empirical generalization, the study emphasizes the interpretive risks that arise when musical stimuli are treated as undifferentiated or stylistically coarse categories.

The central outcome of the paper is the proposal of music analysis as a critical intermediate layer between musical stimuli and the interpretation of results in cognitive research. As the case study demonstrates, without careful analytical mediation, empirical findings risk either being overgeneralized or misattributed, or else constrained to a narrow corpus of traditional, previously validated musical materials. By contrast, analytically informed stimulus design and interpretation can clarify the mechanisms through which music influences cognitive processes, enabling a more confident inclusion of complex contemporary works—and potentially even participants' self-selected music—within emotion and cognition research.

Far from fragmenting, the paper suggests, music theory and analysis may be assuming an increasingly important role as a methodological interface between musical practice and the cognitive sciences, particularly in the study of temporally extended and affectively complex experiences.

Dunston, N. (2024). Colla Voce [Album]. Out Of Your Head Records. https://nickdunston.bandcamp.com/album/Colla-Voce

Droit-Volet, S. (2013). Time perception, emotions and mood disorders. Journal of Physiology Paris, 107(4), 255–264. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jphysparis.2013.03.005

Freud, S. (2003). The Uncanny (D. McLintock, Trans.). Penguin Books.

Jentsch, E. (1906). On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906) 1 (R. Sellers, Trans.). Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift, 8(22), 195–198.