Cloud (music)

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This article is about the musical concept of clouds. For clouds in meteorology, see Cloud. For other uses see Cloud (disambiguation)

In music a cloud is a sound mass consisting of statistical clouds of microsounds and characterized first by the set of elements used in the texture, secondly density, including rhythmic and pitch density (Roads 2001, p.15). Clouds may include ambiguity of rhythmic foreground and background or rhythmic hierarchy.

Examples include:

Iannis Xenakis's Concret PH (1958), Bohor I (1962), Persepolis (1971), and many of his pieces for traditional instruments (ibid)
György Ligeti's Clocks and Clouds (1972-3)
La Monte Young's The Well Tuned Piano
Bernard Parmegiani's De natura sonorum (1975) (ibid)

Clouds are created and used often in granular synthesis. Musical clouds exist on the meso time scale. Clouds allow for the interpentration of sound masses first described by Edgard Varèse including smooth mutation (through crossfade), disintegration, and coalescence. (ibid)

Curtis Roads (ibid) suggests a taxonomy of cloud morphology based on atmospheric clouds: cumulus, stratocumulus, stratus, nimbostratus, and cirrus; as well as nebulae: dark or glowing, amorphus or ring-shaped, and constantly evolving.