music Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all hum ...

, a cloud is a

sound mass In musical composition, a sound mass or sound collective is the result of compositional techniques, in which "the importance of individual pitches" is minimized "in preference for texture, timbre, and dynamics as primary shapers of gesture and ...

consisting of statistical

cloud In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles, suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may ...

s of hundreds or thousands of

microsound Granular synthesis is a sound synthesis method that operates on the microsound time scale. It is based on the same principle as sampling. However, the samples are split into small pieces of around 1 to 100 ms in duration. These small pieces a ...

s and characterized first by the set of elements used in the

texture Texture may refer to: Science and technology * Image texture, the spatial arrangement of color or intensities in an image * Surface texture, the smoothness, roughness, or bumpiness of the surface of an object * Texture (roads), road surface c ...

, secondly density, the number of events within a time period.Roads 2001, p.15 Clouds may include

ambiguity Ambiguity is the type of meaning (linguistics), meaning in which a phrase, statement, or resolution is not explicitly defined, making for several interpretations; others describe it as a concept or statement that has no real reference. A com ...

of rhythmic foreground and background or rhythmic

hierarchy A hierarchy (from Ancient Greek, Greek: , from , 'president of sacred rites') is an arrangement of items (objects, names, values, categories, etc.) that are represented as being "above", "below", or "at the same level as" one another. Hierarchy ...

. Examples include: *

Iannis Xenakis Giannis Klearchou Xenakis (also spelled for professional purposes as Yannis or Iannis Xenakis; , ; 29 May 1922 – 4 February 2001) was a Romanian-born Greek-French avant-garde composer, music theorist, architect, performance director and enginee ...

's ''

Concret PH Concret PH (1958) is a musique concrète piece by Iannis Xenakis, originally created for the Philips Pavilion (designed by Xenakis as Le Corbusier's assistant) at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair (Expo 58) and heard as audiences entered and exited the ...

'' (1958), '' Bohor I'' (1962), ''Persepolis'' (1971), and many of his pieces for traditional instruments *

György Ligeti György Sándor Ligeti (; ; 28 May 1923 – 12 June 2006) was a Hungarian-Austrian composer of contemporary classical music. He has been described as "one of the most important avant-garde music, avant-garde composers in the latter half of the ...

's ''Clocks and Clouds'' (1972–3) *

La Monte Young La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American composer, musician, and performance artist recognized as one of the first American minimalist composers and a central figure in Fluxus and post-war avant-garde music. He is best k ...

's '' The Well Tuned Piano'' * Bernard Parmegiani's ''De natura sonorum'' (1975) Clouds are created and used often in

granular synthesis Granular synthesis is a sound synthesis method that operates on the microsound time scale. It is based on the same principle as sampling. However, the samples are split into small pieces of around 1 to 100 ms in duration. These small pieces a ...

. Musical clouds exist on the "meso" or

formal Formal, formality, informal or informality imply the complying with, or not complying with, some set of requirements ( forms, in Ancient Greek). They may refer to: Dress code and events * Formal wear, attire for formal events * Semi-formal atti ...

time scale. Clouds allow for the interpenetration of sound masses first described by

Edgard Varèse Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse (; also spelled Edgar; December 22, 1883 – November 6, 1965) was a French and American composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States. Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm; h ...

including smooth mutation (through crossfade), disintegration, and coalescence.

Curtis Roads Curtis Roads (born May 9, 1951) is an American composer, author and computer programmer. He composes electronic and electroacoustic music, specializing in granular and pulsar synthesis. Career and music Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Roads studied co ...

suggests a taxonomy of cloud morphology based on atmospheric clouds: cumulus, stratocumulus, stratus, nimbostratus, and cirrus; as well as

nebulae A nebula (; or nebulas) is a distinct luminescent part of interstellar medium, which can consist of ionized, neutral, or molecular hydrogen and also cosmic dust. Nebulae are often star-forming regions, such as in the Pillars of Creation in th ...

: dark or glowing, amorphus or ring-shaped, and constantly evolving.

Sources

Notations

*Roads, Curtis (2001). ''Microsound''. Cambridge: MIT Press. .

External links

Atomic Cloud
Atomic Cloud is an easy to use real-time grain cloud generator for Windows Musical texture {{music-theory-stub