Timing in music refers to the ability to "keep time" accurately and to synchronise to an ensemble as well as "expressive timing" - subtle adjustment of tempo, note

Note

In music, the term note has two primary meanings:#A sign used in musical notation to represent the relative duration and pitch of a sound;#A pitched sound itself....

 or beat

Beat (music)

The beat is the basic unit of time in music, the pulse of the mensural level . In popular use, the beat can refer to a variety of related concepts including: tempo, meter, rhythm and groove...

 duration for aesthetic effect.

Research in music perception

Music Perception

Music Perception is a music journal published by University of California Press, in Berkeley, California. Published five times a year, Music Perception publishes empirical and theoretical papers on such topics as psychology, psychophysics, linguistics, neurology, neurophysiology, artificial...

 and music cognition

Music cognition

Music cognition is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the mental processes that support musical behaviors, including perception, comprehension, memory, attention, and performance...

has shown that time as a subjective structuring of events in music differs from the concept of time in physics . Listeners to music do not perceive rhythm on a continuous scale but recognise rhythmic categories that function as a reference relative to which the deviations in timing can be appreciated . In fact temporal patterns in music combine two different time scales; rhythmic durations such as half and quarter notes on the one hand, and the continuous timing variations that characterize an expressive musical performance on the other.