Music theorist Jonathan Kramer begins his influential volume The Time of Music (1988) with a quote from perhaps an unlikely source: cognitive science and AI researcher Marvin Minsky. Minsky writes,

Kramer describes Minsky's ruminations as ‘whimsical’, and they are, marvellously so. He misreads Minsky's point, however, when he characterises it as an account of how (or suggesting that) ‘time makes music meaningful’ (Kramer 1988: 1). How so? Partly because he could just as easily have arrived at the conclusion that music makes time meaningful, but more so because to assert that time makes music meaningful is to suggest that music does or can exist somehow outside of time; that time is a predicate or quality that can be added to music in order to vivify it. As Christopher Small insists, music does not exist outside its enactment (1998: 6–9); another way to say this is that music is irreducible from its temporal extension, which is to say through the temporally constitutive relational forces that produce a musicking context – this is true whether one believes that music exists in time or that (musical) time is produced through the enactment of events; through the cut into future that Deleuze characterises as his third synthesis of time.