Microsound includes all sound

Sound

Sound is a mechanical wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations.-Propagation of...

s on the time scale shorter than musical notes, the sound object

Sound object

In music a sound object , a generalization of the concept of a musical note, is any sound from any source which in duration is on the time scale of 100 ms to several seconds....

 time scale, and longer than the sample time scale. Specifically this is shorter than one tenth of a second

Second

The second is a unit of measurement of time, and is the International System of Units base unit of time. It may be measured using a clock....

 and longer than 10 millisecond

Millisecond

A millisecond is a thousandth of a second.10 milliseconds are called a centisecond....

s, including the audio frequency

Frequency

Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit time. It is also referred to as temporal frequency.The period is the duration of one cycle in a repeating event, so the period is the reciprocal of the frequency...

 range (20 Hz to 20 kHz) and the infrasonic frequency range (below 20 Hz, 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...

). (Roads 2001, p.vii and 20-28)

These sounds include transient audio phenomena and are known in acoustics

Acoustics

Acoustics is the interdisciplinary science that deals with the study of all mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician while someone working in the field of acoustics...

 and signal processing

Signal processing

Signal processing is an area of systems engineering, electrical engineering and applied mathematics that deals with operations on or analysis of signals, in either discrete or continuous time...

 by various names including sound particles, acoustic quantum, sonal atom, grain, glisson, grainlet, trainlet, microarc, wavelet

Wavelet

A wavelet is a wave-like oscillation with an amplitude that starts out at zero, increases, and then decreases back to zero. It can typically be visualized as a "brief oscillation" like one might see recorded by a seismograph or heart monitor. Generally, wavelets are purposefully crafted to have...

, chirplet, FOF, time-frequency atom, pulsar, impulse, toneburst, tone pip, acoustic pixel, and others. In the frequency domain they may be named kernel, logon, and frame, among others. (ibid)

Physicist Dennis Gabor

Dennis Gabor

Dennis Gabor CBE, FRS was a Hungarian-British electrical engineer and inventor, most notable for inventing holography, for which he later received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics....

 was an important pioneer in microsound. (ibid) Micromontage is musical montage with microsound.

Microtime is the level of "sonic" or aural "syntax

Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....

" or the "time-varying distribution of...spectral

Timbre

In music, timbre is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices and musical instruments, such as string instruments, wind instruments, and percussion instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that determine the...

 energy.".

See also

• Glitch (music)
  Glitch (music)
  Glitch is a term used to describe a genre of electronic music that emerged in the mid to late 1990s. The glitch aesthetic is characterized by a deliberate use of glitch based sonic artifacts that would normally be viewed as unwanted disturbances reducing the overall sound quality and are thus...
  
  
• 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...
  
  
• pulsar synthesis
• Lowercase (music)
  Lowercase (music)
  Originally coined by minimal artist Steve Roden, lowercase is an extreme form of ambient minimalism in which very quiet sounds bookend long stretches of silence. Roden started the movement with an album entitled Forms of Paper, in which he made recordings of himself handling paper in various ways...
  
  
• micromontage
• microtonality
• Microsound.org (mailing list focused on the Microsound aesthetic)

Source

• Roads, Curtis (2001). Microsound. Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-18215-7.

Further reading

• Horacio Vaggione. "Articulating Microtime", Computer Music Journal (MIT Press), Vol. 20, No. 2. (Summer, 1996), pp. 33-38. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0148-9267%28199622%2920%3A2%3C33%3AAM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-0 (Subscription necessary for full access)

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.