Cloud (music)

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 hundreds or thousands of microsounds[1] and characterized first by the set of elements used in the texture, secondly density, the number of events within a time period.[2] Clouds may include ambiguity of rhythmic foreground and background or rhythmic hierarchy.

Examples include:

Clouds are created and used often in granular synthesis. Musical clouds exist on the "meso" or formal time scale. Clouds allow for the interpenetration of sound masses first described by Edgard Varèse including smooth mutation (through crossfade), disintegration, and coalescence.[2]

Curtis Roads[2] 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.

Sources

  1. ^ Roads, Curtis (2015). Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-537324-0.
  2. ^ a b c d e Roads 2001, p.15

Notations

  • Atomic Cloud Atomic Cloud is an easy to use real-time grain cloud generator for Windows


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