This study deals with time and with music, and the link between the two is the suggestion that music is a modeling of the way we construct time. Time--the now, duration, succession and order of succession; the past, the future--is seen as a resource for managing systemic disequilibrium and as the evolutionary elaboration of the now. As organic dynamical systems humans maintain themselves by means of self-regulatory actions, nows, and these nows are proposed as feeding off a pre-temporal, interindividually accessed energy in nature, an ongoing cosmic proto-present. Speech is a way out of...