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Aesthetics of Composing with Microsound
granulation we can decompose it once again into small particles, ``from dust to dust'' (granulation, chapter 5). Such manipulations open up a catalog of new compositional processes: 1 Variations (contrasts, increases, and decreases) of particle density 1 Coalescence (cloud formation) and evaporation (cloud disintegration) 1 Time stretching to extend a microstructure into a large-scale event 1 Time shrinking large events into microsounds 1 Hierarchical variations of the same event structure on multiple time scales 1 Lamination of a cloud through multiple layers with microtemporal delays 1 Particle spatialization (scattering particles in space) 1 Granular reverberation 1 Precise polymetric pulsations in space, created by superimposing multiple metrical streams 1 Multiple formant streams, each with its own frequency and spatial trajectory 1 Spectrum evolution via manipulation of particle envelopes 1 Microsurgery on the Gabor matrix to extract the chaotic, harmonic, loudest, softest, or other selected particles within a sound and reassemble it with alterations Such operations change the practice of composition, and mandate a rethinking of compositional strategy and architecture. This cultural process has only just begun. Heterogenity and Uniqueness of Sound Materials In the 1950s, certain composers began to turn their attention toward the composition of sound material itself. In e¨ect, they extended what had always been true at the phrase level down to the sound object level. Just as every phrase and macro form can be unique, each sound event can have an individual morphology. This creates a greater degree of diversityÐof heterogeneity in sound materialÐwithout necessarily losing continuity to other objects. Chapter 3 showed how we can extend the concept of heterogeneity even further, down to the level of microsound, where each sound particle may be unique. The microstructure of any sound can be decomposed and rearranged, turning it into a unique sound object.