Meanings
- uncommonuncountableentertainmentA studio technique where a guitar solo or other musical part is transposed into a completely different song.
Still, xenochrony was new: he had to fight his own engineers to allow him to do it, and it resulted in some extraordinary music.
1997, Andre Kostelanetz, The Frank Zappa Companion: Four Decades of Commentary, Schirmer Books, →ISBN, page 1831 more example
Xenochrony is the technical term for this, and you can hear it when several shamans participate in one ritual, each with a personal tempo of drumming, each addressing personal spirits. Xenochrony became, in fact, an important strand in the story of K-Space, the trio that Ken Hyder and I put together with Tuvan singer and instrumentalist Gendos Chamzyryn.
2016, Tim Hodgkinson, Music and the Myth of Wholeness: Toward a New Aesthetic Paradigm, MIT Press, →ISBN, page 148
Origin
From xeno- (“alien”) + Ancient Greek χρόνος (khrónos, “time”), coined by Frank Zappa.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
xenochrony. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/xenochrony
“xenochrony.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/xenochrony. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “xenochrony,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/xenochrony.
Source: xenochrony on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.