temporal textures

I have been reading this discussion and wanted to pose some thoughts. They may not be entirely fully formed....

1. To say that one should avoid the habit of  "composing time-based media as functions of one scalar parameter, nominally labelled 'time'" is not the same as saying time can somehow be removed from experience.

2. While many composers may talk as if they are "composing time-based media as functions of one scalar parameter, nominally labelled 'time'" they are in fact not doing so and much music 'analysis' (at least for the past 200 or so years) they are subjected to in the West is in fact not looking at music as experienced in time.

3. Music analysis has at best a value in providing people with metaphors. As Nicholas Cook has argued "it is not an account of how people actually hear pieces of music, but a way of imagining them." He further states that "a musical culture is, in essence, a repertoire of means for imagining music; it is the specific pattern of divergences between the experience of music on the one hand, and the images by means of which it is represented on the other, that gives a musical culture its identity." 

4. In part because of 3 I would be wary of relying too heavily on musically derived theories of rhythm and time. Many or quite complex and intricate but that should not be mistaken for how they map to experience.  

5. Spectrograms are to timbre what MRI scans are to thinking.