Scholars of music cognition and psychology debate whether it is possible to entrain to multiple conflicting meters simultaneously. London (2012) claims such simultaneous entrainment is impossible. Others, including Myler (2023), suggest that polymetric perception can occur through the rapid switching back and forth between entrainment to different meters. Sullivan (2023) argues that it is the unconscious maintenance of several simultaneous metric interpretations that makes the switch from one pattern of entrainment to another possible, modeling this switch as the rising of a new metric interpretation from unconsciousness to consciousness.

This paper expands on these approaches by offering an understanding of polymetric perception rooted in the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's (1968) notion of depth. It claims that the meter(s) to which a listener is not presently entrained in a polymetric texture are not unconscious but rather present at a certain level of perceptual depth. Each meter serves as a dimension that opens up a new level of depth within the metric space. This phenomenological model remains consistent with Sullivan's cognitive model while introducing a new element of depth by allowing it to operate across multiple dimensions. The conception extends Tai's (2025) description of contrapuntal perception in music and dance, wherein audio-visual depth is created by the viewer's switching their attention between dancers, between musical lines, and between the dancers and the music, each of these elements representing a distinct dimension of the audio-visual space.

The application of this description to polymetric perception is modeled analytically by a mapping of musical elements according with different meters onto different dimensions of an n-dimensional space. The switch to entraining to a new meter is represented by a rotation of the space that brings the dimension corresponding to this meter into full view. Dimensions with a higher degree of visibility exist closer to the surface of perception and are more perceptually prominent, while those with a lower degree of visibility exist at a greater depth and are less perceptually prominent. Since intermediate states of entrainment can be represented by partial rotations of the space, this model allows for representation of the ambiguous perceptual states that frequently result when listening to polymetric music. Furthermore, since the switch from one pattern of entrainment to another is viewed as a continuous process of rotation, the model is able to represent polymetric perception without recourse to a synthesis of multiple discrete “percepts,” as in Myler's approach. Its effectiveness is illustrated in a graphic analysis of the opening of Gérard Grisey's Le noir d'étoile.

London, Justin. 2012. Hearing in Time. New York: Oxford University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Northwestern University Press.

Myler, Derek J. 2023. Temporal experience and the music of Charles Ives. Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester.

Sullivan, James. 2023. “Extending the Parallel Multiple-Analysis Processor: Perceived Meter in Post-Tonal Music.” Music Theory Online 29(1).

Tai, Amy Ming Wai. August 2025. “Re-reading Ernst Kurth's Counterpoint through Rudolf Laban.” Invited talk at Sharp (online), research group at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.