In music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

 a cloud is a sound mass

Sound mass

In contrast to more traditional musical textures, sound mass composition "minimizes the importance of individual pitches in preference for texture, timbre, and dynamics as primary shapers of gesture and impact." Developed from the modernist tone clusters and spread to orchestral writing by the late...

 consisting of statistical cloud

Cloud

A cloud is a visible mass of liquid droplets or frozen crystals made of water and/or various chemicals suspended in the atmosphere above the surface of a planetary body. They are also known as aerosols. Clouds in Earth's atmosphere are studied in the cloud physics branch of meteorology...

s of microsound

Microsound

Microsound includes all sounds on the time scale shorter than musical notes, the sound object time scale, and longer than the sample time scale. Specifically this is shorter than one tenth of a second and longer than 10 milliseconds, including the audio frequency range and the infrasonic...

s and characterized first by the set of elements used in the texture, secondly density

Density

The mass density or density of a material is defined as its mass per unit volume. The symbol most often used for density is ρ . In some cases , density is also defined as its weight per unit volume; although, this quantity is more properly called specific weight...

, including rhythm

Rhythm

Rhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...

ic and pitch density . Clouds may include ambiguity

Ambiguity

Ambiguity of words or phrases is the ability to express more than one interpretation. It is distinct from vagueness, which is a statement about the lack of precision contained or available in the information.Context may play a role in resolving ambiguity...

 of rhythmic foreground and background or rhythmic hierarchy

Hierarchy

A hierarchy is an arrangement of items in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another...

.

Examples include:

• Iannis Xenakis
  Iannis Xenakis
  Iannis Xenakis was a Romanian-born Greek ethnic, naturalized French composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers...
  
  's Concret PH (1958), Bohor I (1962), Persepolis (1971), and many of his pieces for traditional instruments
• György Ligeti
  György Ligeti
  György Sándor Ligeti was a composer of contemporary classical music. Born in a Hungarian Jewish family in Transylvania, Romania, he briefly lived in Hungary before becoming an Austrian citizen.-Early life:...
  
  's Clocks and Clouds (1972-3)
• La Monte Young
  La Monte Young
  La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
  
  's The Well Tuned Piano
• Bernard Parmegiani
  Bernard Parmegiani
  Bernard Parmegiani is a composer best known for his electronic or acousmatic music.-Biography:Between 1957 and 1961 he studied mime with Jacques Lecoq, a period he later regarded as important to his work as a composer...
  
  's De natura sonorum (1975)

Clouds are created and used often in granular synthesis

Granular synthesis

Granular synthesis is a basic sound synthesis method that operates on the microsound time scale.It is based on the same principle as sampling. However, the samples are not played back conventionally, but are instead split into small pieces of around 1 to 50ms. These small pieces are called grains...

. Musical clouds exist on the "meso" or formal time scale. Clouds allow for the interpentration of sound masses first described by Edgard Varèse

Edgard Varèse

Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse, , whose name was also spelled Edgar Varèse , was an innovative French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States....

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

Curtis Roads

Curtis Roads

Curtis Roads is a composer of electronic and electroacoustic music specializing in granular and pulsar synthesis, author, and computer programmer....

  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.

External links

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