What's Time? Public Engagement Event At Google Digital Garage

On Tuesday 10th April members of our time lab attended the What's Time? event at Google Digital Garage in Manchester. The event was organised by the Institute of Physics in conjunction with The Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) the Manchester Time Lab and Google.

The event kicked off with two musicians from RNCM (a piano player and a flautist) playing four very different piece of music. The piano played was the Google Manchester Piano, which displays a different image of Manchester depending on which note is played!

The audience members were asked which piece of music they thought lasted the longest. Dr Michelle Phillips from RNCM then gave a talk about time and music, and the different aspects of a piece of music (and the listener) that can affect the perception of its duration.

Following on from this Dr Luke Jones from our time lab gave a talk which was a general introduction to the field of time perception, followed by a Q & A. Lastly Dr Hannah Renshaw from the Institute of Physics gave a talk on the physics of time.

The event also involved experiments that the people could take part in, one experiment was investigating the perception of the duration of different types of music, the other was exploring people's mental imagery for time. We are very grateful to our PhD student Emily Williams for helping out with the experiments in what turned out to be a very busy evening.

Many thanks to everyone that attended, the lovely friendly people at Google, and all who organised the event.