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Over at acousmata, there’s a post featuring Ligeti’s Continuum.

What struck me about this piece at this moment in particular is that just last week in the class I’m TAing (“Anthropology of Sound”), we were discussing what exactly a sound is. Aside from the myriad cultural boundaries around “a” sound, there are some slightly more concrete physical boundaries.

That is, vibrations roughly between 20 Hz and 20 kHz are perceived as sound (higher, and it’s ultrasound, lower and it’s just a series of beats). Another number I’ve heard is 30 milliseconds, meaning that clicks closer together than that are perceived as a tone rather than distinct events. My (probably sloppy) math tells me that a click every 30 ms is actually about 33 Hz, so either that’s a different estimate of the bottom end of human hearing, or there is a difference between a series of clicks perceived as a tone and, say, a sine wave. The science gets past me there.

One of the things that is so great about this Ligeti piece is that it plays with a slightly different distinction: the boundaries of a sound, rather than all sound. Runs blur together, creating textures from the necessarily staccato attacks of the harpsichord. (Yes, it’s on a harpsichord!)

Listen to it, and make sure to go look at the other things on acousmata.

[I’m realizing more that using Tumblr for “real” blogging brings up strange issues. “Reblog” automatically copies the whole original post to your blog, which would be a no-no on a regular blog, but cutting off the commentary from acousmata seems bad too, since then I’ve just sort of stolen his audio upload. I’m thinking in the future I’ll do these posts as links instead of audio.]

update: Looks like Ligeti says a similar thing in a quotation on the Wikipedia page linked in the original acousmata post below:

It takes about eighteen separate sounds per second to reach the threshold where you can no longer make out individual notes, and the limit set by the mechanism of the harpsichord is about fifteen to sixteen notes a second.

More opinions, I guess. Also, the Wikipedia page claims this piece has also been arranged for barrel organ, which I must hear.

double update: yessssss

Györgi Ligeti: Continuum (1968)

From the album Continuum / Zehn Stücke für Bläserquintett / Artikulation / Glissandi / Etüden für Orgel / Volumina

The Hungarian composer Györgi Ligeti (1923-2006), who spent most of his career in Germany and Austria, is widely regarded as one of the most imaginative musical minds of the second half of the 20th century.  He wrote pioneering works in many different media, including electronics, traditional “concert” instruments, and mechanical music.

Ligeti is probably best known for his compositional experiments undertaken in the 1960s, starting with the orchestral work Atmosphères (1961).  In this piece, each of the 55 string instruments plays its own melodic line, creating a dense web of sound in which the identity of the individual parts is lost.  Instead of distinct melodies one hears slowly shifting planes of sound, a glacial condensation and rarefaction of timbral space.  It is an utterly new kind of musical organization, which was also discovered independently around the same time by composers such as Iannis Xenakis, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Friedrich Cerha.

Interestingly, Ligeti and other composers have stated that their experiments with orchestral sound production in the 1960s were inspired in part by the new spectrum of electronic sound that was “in the air” at the time. This is ironic in that much of the history of electronic music has been occupied with efforts to artificially reproduce the sound of traditional instruments.  Here, the tables were turned.

Ligeti described Continuum as an attempt to create a kind of “continuous sound” as he had in Atmosphères, but now using the limited sonic resources of the harpsichord.  Here Ligeti was to explore the threshold between an extremely fast succession of sound events and the perception of a continuous sound— hence the title of the piece.  The principle is the same one that allows us to perceive a mechanically generated succession of 24 images per second as the “moving pictures” of cinema. Continuum is at once a performative tour de force, a highly compressed vehicle of musical expression, and an exploration of the limits of hearing.