Journal of New Music Research

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Sound mass, auditory perception, and ‘post-tone’

music

Jason Noble & Stephen McAdams

To cite this article: Jason Noble & Stephen McAdams (2020) Sound mass, auditory
perception, and ‘post-tone’ music, Journal of New Music Research, 49:3, 231-251, DOI:
10.1080/09298215.2020.1749673

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Published online: 13 Apr 2020.

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JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH
2020, VOL. 49, NO. 3, 231–251
https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2020.1749673

Sound mass, auditory perception, and ‘post-tone’ music

Jason Noble and Stephen McAdams
Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Montréal, Canada

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The term ‘post-tonal’ embodies a broad distinction between musical explorations of new combina- Received 11 August 2019
tions of tones (‘post-tonality’) and explorations of sonic resources other than tones (‘post-tone’). A Accepted 26 March 2020
significant turning-point in post-tone thinking occurred when some composers replaced notes with KEYWORDS
masses of notes, or sound masses, as musical units. Existing definitions of sound mass are reviewed and Sound mass; tone; post-tone;
a new definition drawing on empirical evidence is offered. The perceptual principles that are involved auditory perception; music
in the perception of polyphonic music are demonstrated to also ground sound mass perception, with perception
opposite aesthetic goals achieved through radically different musical organisation.

1. Introduction: post-tonality, post-tone

Against our claim that there is no music in nature, it will
be objected that there is a wealth of diverse voices which
wonderfully enliven nature. Must not the babbling of the
brook, the slap of waves on the shore, the thunder of
avalanches, the raging of the gale have been the incentive
to and prototype of human music? Have all the murmur-
ing, squealing, crashing noises had nothing to do with
the character of our music? We must in fact reply in the
negative. All these natural manifestations are nothing but
noise, i.e. air vibrations of incommensurable frequen-
cies. Seldom at best, and then only in isolated instances,
does nature produce a tone, i.e. a sound of determinate,
measurable pitch, high or low. Tones, however, are the
basic conditions of all music. – Hanslick, On the Musically
Beautiful (1854/1986, p. 71) [Emphasis added]
The common term ‘post-tonal’ implies that music can
be understood in two great camps separated by a stylistic
and historical dividing line. First, there was tonal music
(and its historical antecedents). Then there emerged
some musical styles that, while universally acknowledged
to encompass an enormous number of different prac-
tices, may be defined in contradistinction to tonal music.
The ‘post’ in post-tonal, on our reading, implies a con-
sequent relationship, a way of thinking that is different
from, but preceded and made possible by, tonality: it need
not imply a wholesale negation or rejection of all things
tonal. Indeed, many post-tonal styles continue to employ
materials and techniques of tonal music, but with dif-
ferent aesthetic goals and different methods underlying
their deployment.
We want to suggest that within the term ‘post-tonal’
resides a further broad divide, between two approaches
to music that are distinct in concept if not always in prac-
tice. There is music that continued (and continues) to
accept the premise of Hanslick’s statement above – that
tones are the fundamental building-blocks of music –
and to explore new ways to arrange them. In this cate-
gory, which is post-tonal in the sense of ‘post-tonality,’
we might list free atonality, serialism, minimalism, and
other recent tone-based musics. Different from this, there
is music that broadens the palette of its building blocks
beyond tones, accepting into its vocabulary a wider, per-
haps unrestricted array of sonic resources. This category
includes many strains of aleatoric, electronic, and noise-
based musics, and may be considered post-tonal in the
sense of being ‘post-tone.’ The ‘post’ in post-tone need
not imply a rejection of all tones, just as post-tonality
need not reject all tonal elements. But in post-tone music,
the tone is shaken from its position at the centre of the
musical universe, just as tonal centricity and functional-
ity are stripped of their unchallenged governing authority
in post-tonality. Both ‘posts’ represent a broadening of
domains of musical possibility: of combinatorial possi-
bility on the one hand, and of material possibility on the
other.
The post-tone concept, and the musics that exem-
plify it, are the focus of this essay. It fundamentally
changed the status of timbre in music, which tradition-
ally served as a mere delivery system for tone-based

CONTACT Jason Noble jason.noble@mail.mcgill.ca

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

232 J. NOBLE AND S. MCADAMS
musical ideas, a sensuous sonic surface for the ‘deep
structure’ of music, an ornamental or decorative ‘fill’ for
primary or essential ‘form.’ In post-tone music, timbre
assumes a primary musical role. Instead of notes, chords,
and rhythms, post-tone music deals in spectromorpholo-
gies, auditory gestalts, sound objects, sound itself. The
murmuring, squealing, crashing noises disparaged by
Hanslick become sources of interest, fascination, beauty,
and legitimate sonic resources for musical creation as
the tone-centric distinction between musical and non-
musical sound is dissolved. Robert Erickson could almost
have been responding directly to Hanslick when he
wrote that ‘multiplicity, sound-source groupings, sound
perspective, sound as embedded in the natural order,
sound in its physicality and its endless variety, under-
gird much of the significant music we are hearing today’
(1975, p. 193).
The post-tone concept is manifested in well-known
moments in twentieth-century music history. Arnold
Schoenberg, though perhaps most famous for his devel-
opments in post-tonality, was also an important post-
tone thinker, as evident in his famous developments such
as Sprechstimme (or Sprechgesang), a speech-song hybrid
form of vocal delivery in which pitch and timbre are
constantly fluctuating (Griffiths, 2001),and Klangfarben-
melodie,1 in which timbral transformation assumes a
musical function analogous to the succession of tones in
melody, (Rushton, 2001), as well as his statement that
‘[t]one color is . . . the main topic, pitch a subdivision’
(1911/1983, p. 421). Luigi Russolo, in his futurist mani-
festo ‘The Art of Noises’ (1913/1986), calls for musicians
to ‘substitute for the limited variety of timbres that the
orchestra possesses today the infinite variety of timbres in
noises’ (p. 28). John Cage’s ‘The Future of Music: Credo’
(1958) states his belief that the use of noise would increase
through the use of electrical instruments and accepted
the possibility of substituting the word ‘music’ for ‘a more
meaningful term: organization of sound’ (p. 55). Edgard
Varèse was also willing to replace ‘music’ with ‘organ-
ised sound’ (Tedman, 1983, p. 6) and, in his manifesto
‘The Liberation of Sound’ (1966), imagined works in
which traditional musical conceptions such as melodies
would be irrelevant (p. 11).2 Pierre Schaeffer created
music using real-world sounds, recorded and manipu-
lated in various ways in musique concrète (1966/2017, pp.
31–2). Gérard Grisey declared that ‘[w]e are musicians
1 The term Klangfarbenmelodie has (at least) two different senses: Weber-
nian Klangfarbenmelodie implies a succession of tones with contrasting
timbre/instrumentation, and may be used to enhance pitch structure.
Schoenbergian Klangfarbenmelodie implies a transforming timbre that may
be projected through a single pitch (Rushton, 2001). We refer here to the
Schoenbergian sense.
2 This lecture recalls Varèse’s affinity with Futurist poetics; see Stojanović
(2009).
and our model is sound not literature, sound not math-
ematics, sound not theatre, visual arts, quantum physics,
geology, astrology or acupuncture’ (1982/1998, p. 298).
Jonathan Harvey wrote ‘[i]t is not a question for me of
forsaking harmony and regarding everything as timbre,
rather that harmony can be subsumed into timbre’ (2000,
pp. 13–14).
The post-tonality/post-tone distinction is also evident
in much recent music scholarship. Leigh Landy uses
the term ‘sound-based music’ to denote ‘the art form in
which the sound, that is, not the musical note, is its basic
unit’ (2007, p. 17). Lasse Thoresen writes about ‘a clear
dichotomy: between the pure sound-based music and the
pure interval-based music’ (2015, p. 76). Józef Chomiński
describes ‘sonoristics’ (related to Polish sonorism), whose
musical value is ‘of a purely sonorous origin’ (quoted
in Granat, 2009, p. 822), epitomised by electronic music
which reaches ‘into the very essence of sound’ (p. 825).
Post-tone thinking is illustrated in the sense of the term
‘transformation’ used by sonic artists such as Denis Smal-
ley (1993) and Trevor Wishart (1996). In Smalley’s article
‘Defining Transformations’ (1993), he conceives of trans-
formation as change in the ‘identities’ of sounds. This
may involve ‘source-bonded transformation’ when sound
sources are recognisable, or ‘spectromorphological trans-
formation’ in properties of sounds whose sources are
‘imagined, imaginary, or seem so remote that they appear
nonexistent’ (pp. 280–82). Smalley relates his spectro-
morphological ideas primarily to electroacoustic music
(p. 280), but also states elsewhere that spectromorpho-
logical thinking is appropriate for complex instrumental
music that
is more concerned with timbre than harmony (not that
the borderline between them is very clear), more con-
cerned with the motions of texture than with more
traditional layers of lines and melodic intervals, more
concerned with looser and flexible pacings than with
constant, metrically-driven time. (2011, p. 51)
The notion that post-tone spectromorphologies can
be created with tone-producing musical instruments is
intriguing. How does this work? The underlying princi-
ple was articulated in a famous critique of serialism by
one of the composers Smalley identifies as amenable to
spectromorphological thinking, Iannis Xenakis:
Linear polyphony destroys itself by its very complex-
ity; what one hears is really nothing but a mass of
notes in various registers. The enormous complexity
prevents the audience from following the intertwin-
ing of the lines and has as its macroscopic effect an
irrational and fortuitous dispersion of sounds over the
whole extent of the sonic spectrum. There is conse-
quently a contradiction between the polyphonic linear
system and the heard result, which is surface or mass.
(1971, p. 8)

Here we see a crucial difference between music made
of notes, and music made of masses of notes: somehow,
in certain musical arrangements, the identities of tones
appear to self-immolate, turning attention away from
their relational properties as discrete entities and onto the
sound mass.3 Although much has been written about the
artistic intentions and compositional methods of its com-
posers, sound mass – which we hold to be one of the most
significant developments in post-tone musical thinking
– has been surprisingly little studied from a perceptual
point of view. In this paper, we aim to lay a foundation for
a perceptually grounded understanding of sound mass, in
the hopes that future studies will empirically evaluate and
apply the concepts articulated here. A necessary first step
is to define what we mean by ‘sound mass,’ which, as we
will see, has proven to be no easy task.
It must be said at the outset that composers asso-
ciated with sound mass, including Witold Lutosławski
(1913–1994), Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001), György Ligeti
(1923–2006), and Krzysztof Penderecki (1933–2020),
each developed their own aesthetic agendas and musical
discourses. They do not constitute a ‘school’ in any tra-
ditional sense, and their individual approaches to sound
mass comprise only a subset of each of their composi-
tional practices. They, and later composers who adopted
comparable practices, are referred to here as ‘sound mass
composers’ as a matter of convenience, but this is not to
minimise the significant differences between them and
their respective œuvres.
2. Defining ‘sound mass’
The premise of the sound mass aesthetic, as we inter-
pret it, is that many component parts group into a single
auditory percept; but the grouping need not, and indeed
cannot, be complete. If it were as complete as the fusion of
partials into a human voice, for example, then the sense
of multiplicity would be lost and instead of a mass one
would perceive a single sound source. If such percepts
were considered to be sound masses, then the concept
would provide no basis to distinguish a single tone on
a flute from the opening chord of Ligeti’s Atmosphères
(1980) and would be so general as to be of little use to
music theory or analysis. Furthermore, it is too reductive
to say that listeners cannot hear the individual parts of
a sound mass: it is often possible to do so with focused
attention, just as one can strain to ‘hear out’ an indi-
vidual voice amid the din of the crowd. But there is a
sense that to do this is to miss the point of the music,
3 Danuta Mirka makes a similar point: ‘while all the effort of the serialist com-
posers was focused on individual tones, their audiences neglected that level
of musical phenomena and concentrated instead on large sets of tones’
(1997, p. 6).
JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH 233
whose organisation emphasises totality and minimises
the individual identities of constituent parts. Many great
works from the sound mass canon exploit a perceptual
interplay between local and global listening strategies.
For example, Ligeti’s Lontano (1967) opens with a sin-
gle flute note, initiating a musical line in the traditional
sense. Gradually, more and more lines are added within a
narrow ambitus, and eventually the multiplicity of voices
may become so overwhelming to a line-focused listening
strategy that a global gestalt may emerge in the wake of a
conventionally contrapuntal texture.
Like the more general term mass, which has a diverse
array of meanings and connotations in various con-
texts, sound mass (or soundmass, sound-mass) is used
in many different ways by scholars, and massed effects
have been achieved musically in many different ways
by composers. It should be acknowledged that some
have rejected the term, such as eminent Ligeti scholar
Jane Piper Clendinning, in whose groundbreaking study
‘The Pattern-Meccanico Compositions of György Ligeti’
(1993) the word ‘mass’ never appears. This avoidance
may be due to perceived oversimplifying or pejorative
connotations of the term, perhaps interpreted to imply
a coarse flattening-out of musical nuance, or an impli-
cation that Ligeti, Lutosławski, Penderecki, and Xenakis
were all doing the same thing. However, a review of the
literature reveals many uses of the term that account for
musical variety and subtlety. In the following section, a
sample of 31 definitions of sound mass, gleaned from
books, articles, theses, and dissertations, will be exam-
ined and summarised (Table 1). Only passages judged
to have the character of definitions are considered here:
texts that use the term without attempting to define it are
excluded from the present discussion. The content of the
reviewed definitions will be critiqued in light of original
empirical research, and a new definition, informed both
by historical usage and by our experimental observations,
will be offered.
2.1. Definitions of ‘sound mass’ in the literature:
analysis and critique
The reviewed definitions suggest that the quintessen-
tial feature of sound mass is an emphasis on the
sonic whole with a corollary deemphasis or attenua-
tion of its constituent parts. Masses are denoted as
wholes [1;5],4 totalities or total textures [9;11;15;24],
aggregates or aggregations [5;10;13;26], amalgams [8],
global entities [5;12;15], and congealed structures [27].
They may be conceived vertically, horizontally, or both
4 For ease of reference, numbers in square brackets in this section refer to
Table I.
234 J. NOBLE AND S. MCADAMS

Table 1. Sources of reviewed definitions of ‘sound mass.’ collective spectromorphological behaviours or structures
Textbooks in which smaller elements may be subsumed [8;11] and
[1] Benward and Saker (2015, p. 347) as entities whose component parts are subordinate to the
[2] Kostka (2012, p. 233)
[3] Roig-Francoli (2008, pp. 280–281) overall effect [23;26]. They are characterised in terms of
Scholarly Books, Chapters, and Treatises fusion [3;11;18;27], saturation [30], oversaturation [29],
[4] Edwards (2001, p. 326) and the choric effect [5].
[5] Erickson (1975, pp. 175–193)
[6] Mirka (1997, pp. 8–10; 20)
[7] Schaeffer (1966/2017, pp. 112–13) 2.1.1. Density
[8] Smalley (2011, pp. 50–1, 55)
[9] Xenakis (1971, p. 9) One of the concepts most commonly invoked in relation
Articles to sound mass is density, which is mentioned in 15 of the
[10] Bernard (1999, p. 3)
[11] Drott (2011, pp. 7–8; 16; 28–9; 36–7) 31 reviewed definitions [1;3;5;6;8;10;11;13;14;15;20;21;
[12] Harley (1995, p. 221) 23;25;29] and is sometimes identified as a primary
[13] Harley (1998, p. 65) parameter of sound mass composition [3;23]. A requi-
[14] Klein (1967, pp. 123–24)
[15] Reiprich (1978, p. 167) site threshold of density for sound mass is sometimes
[16] Reynolds (2013, p.205) posited but seldom defined [1;20;23], and density is
[17] Strawn (1978, pp. 140; 143)
[18] Truax (1990, pp. 123-24) sometimes identified negatively as what is left when tra-
[19] Wen-Chung (1966, p. 3) ditional parameters such as harmony and rhythm are
Theses and Dissertations
[20] Besharse (2009, pp. 54–5) neutralised [25;29]. Authors vary in associating the term
[21] Foy (1994, pp. 1; 16; 23–5) with vertical pitch density [10], horizontal event den-
[22] Fulford (1979, pp. 2–3) sity [13], and timbral, spectral, or colouristic density
[23] Hoogewind (2000, p. 34)
[24] Iverson (2009, pp. 2–4) [8;14;15]. Textures, especially canonic [15;29] or poly-
[25] Lefresne (2005, pp. 100–1) phonic/micropolyphonic textures [1;5;11;21;23], are fre-
[26] Roberts (1978, p. 5)
[27] Smoot (1986, pp. 2–3) quently described in terms of density or implied to be
[28] Stephenson (1988, pp. 2–3) dense even if this word does not appear in the definition
[29] Svard (1991, abstract; pp. 22–3)
[30] Van der Slice (1980, pp. 9–10) [24;26]. Other terms might be interpreted as proxies for
[31] Wood (1974, pp. 7–8) vertical density, especially cluster, which appears in 10 of
the 31 definitions [1;2;3;4;6;8;20;21;24;29] and is some-
times identified as an exemplar or prototype of sound
[22;28;31]. Authors frequently emphasise the contrast mass [2;20;21;24] or a synonym for sound mass [29].
between micro-level construction and macro-level per- Terms related to dense deployment of pitches appear
ception [9;12;15;18;24], as well as the importance of frequently, including references to the packing or fill-
internal properties [6;18;19;20]. Such characterisations ing of regions of pitch space with semitones [3;10;21;25],
highlight stark differences between the poietic level of microtonal intervals [3;6;21], and glissandi [4;6;21]. The
production and the esthesic level of reception in sound importance of span, compass, or ambitus in delimiting
mass (Nattiez, 1987/1990, pp. 11–12), which is some- the range or identity of the mass is sometimes emphasised
times described in terms of a discrepancy between what [10;11]. A number of metaphorical images related to
is seen in the score (if there is one) and what is heard density appear frequently in these definitions, including
in the music [3;29], sometimes in terms of the diffi- blocks [3;5;6;14;17;20;23;25;26], clouds [5;13;14], webs
culty or impossibility of perceiving discrete elements [5;11;24], and knots [8]. In general, an enormously rich
[1;3;5;11;12;15;30], and sometimes in terms of the irrel- vocabulary of metaphorical imagery is used to describe
evance or minimised importance of discrete elements, sound mass. This will be the subject of a future paper.
especially pitch content [2;4;6;18;20;23;24;26]. In spite
of their diminished importance, such discrete elements 2.1.2. Complexity
are often precisely notated in more-or-less conventional Another recurring concept in this literature is complexity,
scores. In other cases, composers have adopted graphical mentioned in 10 out of 31 definitions [1;3;8;11;12;13;15;
notation for sound masses, especially the characteristic 18;23;26]. Sometimes the term applies to pitch formations
solid black bands that indicate filled regions of the pitch [3], sometimes to textural or contrapuntal intricacy
spectrum [3]. Some authors emphasise subjective aspects [12;18;23], and sometimes to sonorities or spectral con-
of sound mass perception such as psychological impact tent [8;13]. It is often identified as a requisite condi-
[2], the role of the listener’s attention in adopting a global tion of sound mass [1;15;23;26], although, as with den-
listening perspective [11;15], and recognition of the mass sity, the threshold is usually left undefined. The related
as a unit or fundamental event in spite of changing concepts of rhythmic intricacy or microprocesses [1;5],
surface features [22;30]. Sound masses are described as extreme activity [2], and extremely rapid succession of

tones [29] are sometimes invoked. Some authors empha-
sise large numbers of parts, events, or sound sources
[1;5;9;11;18;20;29], and statistical or stochastic distribu-
tions [9;18;24;30].
2.1.3. Timbre and the inversion of hierarchies
Many authors observe that sound mass inverts tradi-
tional hierarchies of musical parameters, diminishing or
obliterating the role of erstwhile ‘primary’ parameters
of discrete pitch and rhythm [10;25;26], and emancipat-
ing ‘secondary’ parameters such as sound value, texture,
dynamics, volume, gesture, register, and especially tim-
bre [3;6;13;15;23;24;29]. Several authors [4;5;6] explicitly
address the role of sound mass in diminishing the status
of the tone as the axiomatic unit of music, emphasising
instead new timbres and playing techniques. Klein even
claims that Varèse’s sound-mass music is ‘anti-harmonic’
[14]. Cross-modal imagery of colour [3;15;24;29] and
blurring [29] are invoked, as is diminished clarity of dis-
tinctions between categories that had previously been
considered separate, such as tone and noise [4;6;8;10] or
timbre and harmony [8]. Out of this body of definitions,
only three mention homogeneity [5;6;24], though Smoot
paraphrases it in the concept of ‘fused ensemble timbre’
[27] in which individual component instruments cannot
be discerned. This relative lack of emphasis on homo-
geneity is significant in light of our experimental findings,
summarised below.
2.1.4. Time and space
Relations between sound mass, time, and space (literal
or metaphorical) are also emphasised in many of these
definitions. Authors differ somewhat in characterisations
of sound mass behaviour, with some claiming that they
remain fairly constant or static over a duration of time
[13;20;22], and others emphasising continuity, fluctua-
tion, transformation, transmutation, contoured motions
through time, plastic moulds of time, and constant or
dynamic change [5;8;9;15;18;19;31]. Some authors state
that sound mass may be either static or dynamic, or both
static and dynamic [3;11;23;29]. The importance of pitch
or register space in sound mass identification is empha-
sised [13], and spatial metaphors such as plane, field,
zone, volume, location, motion, movement, mobility, col-
lision, penetration, and interpenetration are frequently
invoked [5;6;7;11;14;16;17;19;22].
2.1.5. Varèse
While the term ‘sound mass’ (masse sonore) had been
a French locution in various discourses since the mid-
nineteenth century,5 the contemporary usage of the term
5 Thanks to John Rea for drawing our attention to this fact.
JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH 235
is largely attributable to the composer Edgard Varèse
who coined it in a lecture in 1936, later published in the
manifesto ‘The Liberation of Sound’ (1966):
When new instruments will allow me to write music as
I conceive it, taking the place of the linear counterpoint,
the movement of sound-masses, of shifting planes, will
be clearly perceived. When these sound-masses collide
the phenomena of penetration or repulsion will seem
to occur. Certain transmutations taking place on certain
planes will seem to be projected onto other planes, mov-
ing at different speeds and at different angles. There will
no longer be the old conception of melody or interplay of
melodies. The entire work will be a melodic totality. The
entire work will flow as a river flows. (p. 11)
Varèse seems to have used the term ‘sound mass’ in a
somewhat broader and looser sense than many other
authors [27]. As Wen-Chung (1966) characterises it, a
Varèsian sound mass is ‘a body of sounds with certain
specific attributes in interval content, register, contour,
timbre, intensity, attack and decay’ [19]; as Reynolds
(2013) notes, it follows that, in Varèse’s terminology,
‘[o]ne must be prepared to consider any sound ele-
ment . . . to have a sonic palpability meriting the term
“mass”’ [16].
2.1.6. Other exceptions
There are several definitions (or parts of definitions) in
this literature that seem to run contrary to the others:
Schaeffer, in his Treatise on Musical Objects [7], invokes
the term mass as an approximate synonym for spectral
distribution or bulk, and characterises it as a property
of all sounds rather than a special category. Besharse
describes soundmass as ‘essentially chordal in nature’
[20] and Kostka identifies polychords played fortissimo
as a type of sound mass [2]. In emphasising chordal
natures or structures as essential characteristics, these
authors run counter to the more frequently asserted posi-
tion that sound mass diminishes the role of discrete pitch,
interval, and harmony.
2.2. Experimental research: fusion, density,
complexity, homogeneity
In spite of the profusion of theoretical and analytical
research on sound mass, there is an almost total absence
of empirical study on sound mass perception in the pub-
lished literature. Eric Drott (2011) offers an exemplary
analysis of Ligeti’s Kyrie that stands apart in its appli-
cation of the principles of auditory streaming, but does
so in an ‘admittedly unsystematic manner’ (p. 9) without
empirical corroboration. Nearly all authors acknowledge
the perceptual telos of this music, but tend to do so based
on intuition or self-examination of their own perceptions
rather than intersubjective perceptual study. Therefore,
236 J. NOBLE AND S. MCADAMS
the generalizability of many claims in the theoretical
literature remains to be demonstrated.
A first step towards addressing this situation was
taken in an experiment conducted at the Music Per-
ception and Cognition Lab at McGill University (Noble,
2018, pp. 120–53). A complete account of this exper-
iment is beyond the scope of the present discussion:
here we present selected findings germane to the sub-
ject at hand. Thirty-eight listeners heard forty excerpts
of twentieth- and twenty-first-century music featuring
sound mass and related fusion-based aesthetics (e.g.
granular synthesis, spectralism). Participants included
roughly equal numbers of musicians and non-musicians,
but statistical differences in their responses did not war-
rant treating them separately in the results reported
here. Excerpts were chosen to include a wide variety
of contrasting musical/sonic attributes, representing var-
ious ways sound mass may be achieved composition-
ally (see Section 3, below). Additionally, some excerpts
that were judged by the authors to have similar musi-
cal/sonic attributes to the sound mass examples but to
be less perceptually assimilated were included as counter-
examples, such that a range of degrees of sound mass
fusion were represented in the stimuli. Excerpts were
approximately 15 s in duration and maintained rela-
tively consistent textures over their durations. Listeners
were provided the following non-technical explanation of
‘sound mass’:
Sound mass exists when multiple sound events or sources
are heard as a single meaningful unit. Examples are
encountered on a daily basis: a large crowd of people,
a flock of birds, rustling leaves, traffic noise, shattering
glass, etc. In each of these cases, the individual sound
sources are no longer heard as individuals, but they
contribute to the sound of the whole (i.e. the sound
mass).
Music, especially contemporary music, frequently makes
use of this phenomenon, creating textures in which many
notes, sounds, instruments, voices, etc. are grouped into
a mass. Musical sound masses may be very different from
one another in their sound quality, organization, and
behavior, but they always involve multiple sounds being
grouped into a unit. In this study, we will refer to this
grouping of sounds into a mass as fusion. There may be
degrees of fusion, as some sounds may be grouped more
strongly than others. It is possible for some of the sounds
that you hear at any given time to fuse into a mass while
others retain their individual identities, as when a single
voice stands out from a crowd.
Listeners provided one rating for each musical excerpt
on each of four different scales: Fusion (as defined
in the above explanation), Density (defined as ‘com-
pactness of sound components’), Complexity (‘intri-
cacy or interconnectedness of sound components’),
and Homogeneity (‘degree of similarity between sound
components’).6 Density, Complexity, and Homogene-
ity were chosen based on use in the literature as
well as our intuitions about which semantic categories
were most relevant to sound mass fusion. The terms
were presented on continuous sliders without explicit
numerical calibration as continuous ranges between
these terms and their opposites (completely fused–not
fused at all; dense–sparse; complex–simple; homoge-
neous–heterogeneous). They were subsequently coded in
the computer on a scale from 0 to 1. The definitions we
gave for these terms did not specify musical parameters
such as pitch, rhythm, or timbre. Rather, listeners were
left to freely decide which musical or sonic attributes con-
tribute to their impressions of density, complexity, and
homogeneity. After the rating task was complete, listen-
ers verbally described their method of rating for each of
these categories.
Significant variation across excerpts was observed for
all four rating categories, suggesting that listeners associ-
ated them with variable properties in the music. Signifi-
cant correlations between fusion and the other categories
were also observed, suggesting that density, complexity,
and homogeneity do indeed relate meaningfully to sound
mass fusion. However, there were some big surprises
regarding the nature and robustness of these correla-
tions. If the content of the published definitions of sound
mass reviewed above is an index, one would expect all
three categories to correlate positively with sound mass
fusion, with density having the greatest effect, complex-
ity the next greatest, and homogeneity the least. This is
not at all what was observed. Each of the graphs in Fig-
ures 1–3 presents the stimuli in ascending order for aver-
aged Fusion ratings, with Fusion presented as a dotted
line and Density, Complexity, and Homogeneity, respec-
tively, superposed as a solid black line, to demonstrate the
correlations between them. A positive but relatively mod-
est correlation (r = .491) was found between sound mass
fusion and density (Figure 1).
A robust negative correlation (r = −.828) was
observed between sound mass fusion and complexity
(Figure 2). The strongest relationship was a robust pos-
itive correlation (r = .865) between sound mass fusion
and homogeneity (Figure 3). Table 2 lists the stimuli
with numbers corresponding to the graphs (x axis), in
descending order for Fusion ratings. Based on listeners’
verbal descriptions, homogeneity is strongly associated
with timbre, complexity is most associated with rhythm
6 There were also two other blocks in the experiment, in which participants
rated the same stimuli along batteries of other semantic scales derived from
the published literature on sound mass. It is beyond the scope of this paper
to report on these other blocks and their subsequent analyses, but they are
detailed in Noble (2018) and will be the subject of a future paper.
 JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH 237

Figure 1. Ratings for 40 excerpts for Fusion and Density, arranged in increasing order for Fusion ratings.

Figure 2. Ratings for 40 excerpts for Fusion and Complexity, arranged in increasing order for Fusion ratings.

and/or texture, and density is interpreted both verti-
cally as number of layers and horizontally as rhythmic
organisation, as well as in terms of metaphorical imagery
(especially spatial imagery).
2.2.1. Perceptual vs. acoustical attributes
A possible explanation for the observed differences of
emphases between published definitions and listener
responses lies in a confusion of perceived density, com-
plexity, and homogeneity with acoustical density, com-
plexity, and homogeneity. In particular, the negative
correlation between complexity and fusion may seem
counterintuitive because sound masses are often char-
acterised by highly complex musical constructions and
acoustical signals, but it makes sense in terms of the limits
of our auditory information processing capabilities. After
a certain point, we are no longer able to parse incoming

Figure 3. Ratings for 40 excerpts for Fusion and Homogeneity, arranged in increasing order for Fusion ratings.
238 J. NOBLE AND S. MCADAMS

Table 2. Sources of the 40 excerpts.

Fusion Ranking Composer Title Stimulus Name Location in Score Time in Recording
40 György Ligeti Atmosphères Atmosphères (2) m. 40 3:45
39 Krzysztof Penderecki Polymorphia Polymorphia (1) R. 8 1:35
38 Iannis Xenakis Mycenae Alpha Mycenae Alpha beginning 0:00
37 Jonathan Harvey Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco Mortuos Plango – 2:44
36 Jean-Claude Risset Sud Sud n/a 1:55
35 Iannis Xenakis Metastaseis Metastaseis m. 317 8:00
34 Kaija Saariaho Du cristal Du Cristal R. H 3:02
33 Krzysztof Penderecki Threnody to the Victims of Threnody R. 70 9:08
Hiroshima
32 György Ligeti Atmosphères Atmosphères (1) m. 1 0:00
31 Witold Lutosławski Mi-parti Mi-Parti R. 40 10:04
30 Henryk Górecki Symphony No. 3 Gorecki Symphony No. 3 m. 26 1:12
29 Toru Takemitsu Asterism Asterism (1) m. 88 6:50
28 György Ligeti Volumina Volumina R. 1 0:15
27 György Ligeti Requiem Requiem m. 3 0:12
26 Philippe Hurel Six Miniatures en Trompe-l’œil Six Miniatures vi. m. 32 vi. 1:58
25 Veljo Tormis Jaanilaulud Jaanilaulud m. 104 4:22
24 Gérard Grisey Partiels Partiels m. 1 0:05
23 György Ligeti Double Concerto for Flute, Oboe Ligeti Double Concerto (1) m. 32 II: 1:15
and Orchestra
22 Trevor Wishart Vox Vox n/a 2:18
21 Krzysztof Penderecki Polymorphia Polymorphia (2) R. 17 2:50
20 Witold Lutosławski Musique funèbre Musique Funèbre R. 240 9:05
19 Barry Truax The Wings of Nike Wings of Nike n/a II: 0:30
18 Georg F. Haas Hyperion Hyperion R. L 25:08
17 Barry Truax Riverrun Riverrun n/a 2:15
16 György Ligeti Double Concerto for Flute, Oboe Ligeti Double Concerto (3) II: m. 1 II: 0:00
and Orchestra
15 György Ligeti Double Concerto for Flute, Oboe Ligeti Double Concerto (2) II: m. 56 II: 2:04
and Orchestra
14 Witold Lutosławski Double Concerto for Oboe, Harp Lutosławski Double Concerto m. 1 0:00
and Chamber Orchestra
13 Barry Truax Pacific Pacific n/a IV. 9:20
12 Karlheinz Stockhausen Stimmung Stimmung R. 12 mvt. 12, 0:12
11 Stéphane Roy Crystal Music Crystal Music n/a 8:55
10 Franck Bedrossian Tracés d’Ombres Tracés d’Ombres II. m. 5 3:20
9 Francis Dhomont Points de Fuite Points de Fuites n/a 2:18
8 Witold Lutosławski Symphony No. 2 Lutosławski Symohony No. 2 R. 1 0:20
7 Witold Lutosławski Trois Poèmes d’Henri Michaux Trois Poèmes d’Henri Michaux II: R. 48 II: 2:45
6 Iannis Xenakis Pithoprakta Pithoprakta m. 49 2:14
5 György Ligeti Double Concerto for Flute, Oboe Ligeti Double Concerto (4) II: m. 121 4:30
and Orchestra
4 Stéphane Roy Mimetismo Mimetismo n/a 2:20
3 Witold Lutosławski Jeux vénitiens Jeux Vénitiens R. A 0:01
2 Toru Takemitsu Asterism Asterism (2) R. F 10:05
1 Robert Normandeau Clair de Terre Clair de Terre n/a 13: 0:15

information into meaningful units, and increasing acous-
tical complexity results in decreasing perceived complex-
ity as superimposed acoustical details cancel each other
out and meld together in a perceptual representation.7
Stockhausen made this point in observing that at a cer-
tain point of complexity, sound events lose their rhythmic
character and instead contribute to the timbre of the
7 Lasse Thoresen describes this situation as
a category in which the very complex and the very sim-
ple meet in a paradoxical, ambivalent union. We shall call
this form-element paradoxical complexity—a specific case
of the classical coincidentia oppositorum, the unity of oppo-
sites. It applies to objects with myriad details, but with a
perceptually simple overall character. A homogenous accu-
mulation . . . may often qualify for this category. (2015,
p. 457)
mass (Iverson, 2009). With respect to density, it is not
guaranteed that those musical constructions or acousti-
cal signals that appear to be the densest will necessarily be
perceived that way. As noted above, the reviewed defini-
tions of sound mass make frequent mention of clusters as
exemplars of density, with the tacit assumption that chro-
matically or microtonally filled pitch space is the densest.
But in a pilot study conducted with Eddy Kazazis at the
Music Perception and Cognition Lab at McGill Univer-
sity (Noble, 2018, pp. 58–67), in which 22 listeners pro-
vided ratings for various groups of notes on scales includ-
ing density, it was found that the sheer number of notes,
regardless of their distribution in pitch space, was by far
the strongest predictor of perceived density, accounting
for over 90% of the variance in the ratings. That is, a group
of eight notes tended to have higher ratings for perceived

density than a group of six notes, whether those notes
were distributed as a chromatic cluster, two smaller clus-
ters separated by a wide gap, an approximately tertian
chord with more conventional voicing, or various other
distributions (Figure 4).
As for perceived homogeneity, its robust correla-
tion with sound mass fusion seems highly intuitive: by
definition, the more heterogeneous an auditory percept,
the less cohesive and fused it is. As such, it is interest-
ing that this term is so much less emphasised in the
reviewed body of sound mass definitions than density
and complexity.
2.3. Proposed definition of ‘sound mass’
In our opinion, no published definition of which we are
aware sufficiently accounts for both poietic and esthesic
sides of the semiological tripartition, and no study of
which we are aware sufficiently explicates the sound mass
concept in terms of perceptual principles. These are two
major aims of the present study. The definition we pro-
pose is:
Sound mass: A perceptually homogeneous and dense
auditory unit integrating multiple sound events or com-
ponents while retaining an impression of multiplicity.
Although their acoustical correlates may be highly com-
plex, sound masses are perceptually simple because they
resist perceptual segregation in one or more parameters
(e.g. pitch, rhythm, timbre).
The foregoing discussion has described why sound
masses are taken to be perceptually dense and homo-
geneous, why they are taken to be auditory units inte-
grating multiple sound events or components, why they
are perceptually simple even though their acoustical cor-
relates may be highly complex, and why the retention
of an impression of multiplicity is an essential feature.
The remaining qualification – resistance of perceptual
segregation in one or more parameters – is complicated
and requires a detailed exposition. Perceptual integration
(qua resistance of segregation) can be effected in many
different ways: even a cursory review of the sound mass
canon (or of contemporary music in general) reveals that
the techniques composers have used to bring about per-
ceptual integration are numerous and varied. Sound mass
effects are united, as we have claimed, by their perceptual
density, simplicity, and homogeneity, but the threshold
values that define what is perceptually dense, simple, and
homogeneous vary widely depending on musical context
– in terms of covariant factors such as timbre, register,
dynamics, tempo, rhythmic activity, pitch distribution,
and so forth – due to peculiarities of human auditory per-
ception and music cognition. Therefore, if we wish for
our account of sound mass perception to be thorough, we
JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH 239
cannot stop at positing the requirements of density, sim-
plicity, and homogeneity, but must relate these concepts
to perceptual principles. This is the aim of the follow-
ing section, with reference to several illustrative examples
from the sound mass repertoire.
3. Sound mass and perceptual principles
Although the perceptual principles in question are little-
studied with respect to sound mass, their roles in other
types of music have been examined in detail. In particu-
lar, polyphonic music, whose voice leading maintains the
concurrent independence of multiple auditory streams,
applies the same principles in reverse: that is, the same
principles that allow the lines in a fugue to segregate
into separate streams also allow the lines of microp-
olyphony to assimilate into a mass. In his 2001 paper
‘Tone and voice: A derivation of the rules of voice-leading
from perceptual principles,’ David Huron explains the
rules of polyphonic voice-leading in terms of principles
of auditory perception. He does not claim that voice-
leading rules are or ought to be musical universals, but
rather states that ‘even if the “rules of voice leading” were
shown to be somehow immutable, their musical rele-
vance depends entirely on the acceptance of the underly-
ing perceptual goals . . . different genres might manifest
different perceptual goals that evoke pleasure in other
ways’ (pp. 56–58). This is just the situation we encounter
in sound mass music. The same principles that ground
tonal voice-leading rules remain operative, but due to
radically different musical organisation, they serve to
attenuate the perceptual independence of lines and to
assimilate them into an auditory unit. Since Huron’s
paper provides a systematic overview of these princi-
ples, the following discussion will present them as Huron
does, and then demonstrate their relevance to techniques
of sound mass composition with references to selected
examples of twentieth- and twenty-first-century music.
These principles are by no means mutually exclusive, and
frequently operate together.
The principles Huron invokes are:
(1) Toneness Principle
(2) Principle of Temporal Continuity
(3) Minimum Masking Principle
(4) Tonal Fusion Principle
(5) Pitch Proximity Principle
(6) Pitch Co-modulation Principle
(7) Onset Synchrony Principle
(8) Principle of Limited Density
(9) Timbral Differentiation Principle
(10) Source Location Principle
240 J. NOBLE AND S. MCADAMS
Figure 4. Chords from pilot study, arranged in increasing order for listeners’ ratings for Density.
3.1. Toneness principle
Strong auditory images are evoked when tones exhibit
a high degree of toneness. A useful measure of tone-
ness is provided by virtual pitch weight. Tones having the
highest virtual pitch weights are harmonic complex tones
centered in the region between F2 and G5. Tones hav-
ing inharmonic partials produce competing virtual pitch
perceptions, and so evoke more diffuse auditory images.
(Huron, 2001, p. 10)
The toneness principle provides the perceptual foun-
dation for tone-centrism in traditional Western music,
favouring ‘harmonic complex tones’ (multiple partials
related by simple ratios) over inharmonic sounds (irra-
tionally related partials) or noise-based sounds (random
or pseudo-random distribution of energy) as producers
of strong auditory images. Another major factor in tone-
ness is register. Although human hearing extends roughly
from 20 Hz to 20 kHz, pitch perception is not uniform
throughout this range: towards the bottom end we hear
indistinct ‘rumbling,’ and towards the top we hear indis-
tinct ‘sizzling,’ with clear pitch perception residing in the
range from about 30 Hz to about 4000–5000 Hz (Plack,
2014, pp. 118–19). As Huron observes, we are maximally
sensitive to pitch between F 2 (87 Hz) and G5 (784 Hz),
roughly coterminous with the range covered by the grand
staff and the combined ranges of the adult male and
female voices. Harmonic spectra with fundamentals in
this range – such as most sounds produced by orches-
tral instruments – have a strong tendency to stand out
as distinct tones, thereby resisting or destroying sound
mass integration unless their pitch salience is attenuated
in some way.
Sound mass composers have responded to this per-
ceptual challenge in several ways, such as by embracing
extreme registers in their musical vocabularies. Undoubt-
edly the most famous example of a high-register mass
in Penderecki’s œuvre is the opening of Threnody for
the Victims of Hiroshima (1961b), in which the string
instruments play the highest (indeterminate) pitch avail-
able on their instrument, fortissimo. Penderecki exploits
the extreme low register in the opening section of Poly-
morphia (1963), which features very low notes in the
celli and double basses. Another way to subvert the
toneness principle is to use non-harmonic sounds as
musical building blocks. For example, in Fluorescences
(1962), Penderecki calls for a wide variety of noise-based
sounds, including the key-click and typewriter section at
rehearsal 20.
3.2. Principle of temporal continuity
In order to evoke strong auditory streams, use continu-
ous or recurring rather than brief or intermittent sound
sources. Intermittent sounds should be separated by no
more than roughly 800 ms of silence in order to ensure
the perception of continuity. (p. 12)
Temporal continuity is usually a property of sound
masses in toto, but discontinuity in individual parts
sometimes helps prevent their constituent sound events
from forming separate streams that can be perceptually
segregated from the mass. This may be achieved by sepa-
rating events with rests, as in section 43 of Lutosławski’s
Symphony No. 2 (1973) in which progressively elon-
gated rests inhibit internal stream integration within
parts, favouring instead global integration between parts
(Figure 5).
3.3. Minimum masking principle
In order to minimize auditory masking within some
vertical sonority, approximately equivalent amounts of
spectral energy should fall in each critical band. For typ-
ical complex harmonic tones, this generally means that
simultaneously sounding notes should be more widely
spaced as the register descends. (p. 18)
What Huron refers to as ‘masking’ might be more gener-
ally framed as the interference between vibrations on the
basilar membrane (the part of the cochlea that transduces
incoming sound signals into neural impulses), causing
beating and sensory dissonance.8 The term critical band
refers to any region approximately one-millimeter long
on the basilar membrane: simultaneous frequencies that
fall within a critical band are close enough to physically
interfere with one another. In terms of perceived pitch,
the interval covered per critical band is much greater in
low registers than in high: as a result, two tones separated
8 Huron’s usage differs somewhat from the way the term ‘masking’ is used
by some other authors: for example, according to Christopher Plack, ‘[m]
asking occurs whenever the activity produced on the basilar membrane by
one sound (the masker) obscures the activity produced by the sound you
are trying to hear (the signal)’ (2014, p. 91).

Figure 5. Witold Lutosławski, Symphony No. 2, section 43.
by, for example, a major third in a low register will fall
within the same critical band and interfere with one
another, but two tones separated by the same interval
in a high register will fall in different critical bands and
will not interfere. As Huron explains, this is why chord
voicing in tonal music tends to favour wider intervals at
the bottom and narrower intervals at the top, minimis-
ing sensory dissonance and maximising pitch resolution.
That being said, most musical sounds have many fre-
quency components, and even sounds with widely spaced
fundamental frequencies may have higher harmonics
that fall within the same critical bands, creating inter-
actions that contribute to phenomena such as sensory
dissonance.
In sound mass, pitch resolution detracts from the aes-
thetic goal of global integration or fusion, and so the
mutual interference of frequencies in the same critical
JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH 241
band may often be desirable. This is a characteristic fea-
ture of the type of sound mass identified by some as
prototypical, the cluster, which harnesses interference to
use sounds that may have high toneness in the register of
maximal pitch salience without disintegrating the mass
into separate auditory streams. For example, the chord of
arrival following the famous glissando ascent/expansion
at the beginning of Xenakis’s Metastaseis (1952) contains
46 pitches separated mostly by semitones or whole tones.
Electronic resources, such as the UPIC system devel-
oped by Xenakis, expand the potential for density even
further, allowing complete saturation of all frequencies
within a defined range in compositions such as Mycenae
Alpha (1978). Masking also enables sound mass fusion
in more active textures, as noted by Drott (2011) who
refers to a masking effect between overlapping parts in
micropolyphony.
242 J. NOBLE AND S. MCADAMS
3.4. Tonal fusion principle
The perceptual independence of concurrent tones is
weakened when their pitch relations promote tonal
fusion. Intervals that promote tonal fusion include (in
decreasing order): unisons, octaves, perfect fifths, . . .
Where the goal is the perceptual independence of con-
current sounds, intervals ought to be shunned in direct
proportion to the degree to which they promote tonal
fusion. (p. 19)
This is a circumscribed sense of the term ‘fusion’ which
does not apply to many types of sound mass. How-
ever, it is singularly important for the ‘spectral sound-
mass’ described by Besharse (2009), which exploits the
auditory system’s strong tendency to group harmon-
ically related partials together. Spectral soundmasses,
sometimes denoted with different names such as spec-
tral sonorities or spectral chords, may not only use
intervals that promote tonal fusion, but may recreate
the complex structure of real or ideal harmonic spec-
tra in order to maximise perceptual fusion. As Lasse
Thoresen observes, ‘[a] spectral chord is ideally fused
to the extent it approaches a sound-object with a tim-
bre’ (2015, p. 343). Fusion of this kind, which occupies
the much-discussed liminal realm between timbre and
harmony, can be achieved synthetically with combina-
tions of sine tones and other electronically generated
sound components, or it can be achieved with instrumen-
tal synthesis, the classic example being Grisey’s Partiels
(1978) in which the low E of the trombone and dou-
ble bass is orchestrated by assigning the frequencies of
their spectra to other instruments. As Robert Hasegawa
points out,
[t]he goal of instrumental synthesis is not a precise repro-
duction of the trombone sound – which would in any
case be impossible given the complex spectra of acoustic
instruments – but rather a hybrid sonority permitting us
to hear both the individual instruments and their fusion
into a unified timbre. (2009, pp. 349–50)
Similar effects can also be achieved with human voices:
Stockhausen’s Stimmung (1968), which is based entirely
on a spectral voicing of a B-flat dominant 9th chord,
adopts a proto-spectral aesthetic grounded in tonal
fusion.
3.5. Pitch proximity principle
The coherence of an auditory stream is maintained by
close pitch proximity in successive tones within the
stream. Pitch-based streaming is assured when pitch
movement is within van Noorden’s ‘fission boundary’
(normally 2 semitones or less for tones less than 700 ms
in duration). When pitch distances are large, it may be
possible to maintain the perception of a single stream by
reducing the tempo. (p. 24)
The pitch proximity principle refers to successive rather
than simultaneous tones: at most musical tempi, melodic
continuity is promoted by small intervals and dimin-
ished by larger intervals. It is therefore possible to weaken
the continuity (stream integration) of individual musi-
cal lines by populating them with large leaps. When such
lines are multiply superposed, the weakness or absence
of integration within each line makes it more likely that
the notes will integrate into a composite mass rather than
segregating into separate streams. An example is found
at rehearsal 10 in Penderecki’s Dimensions of Time and
Silence (1959–60), in which the wide leaps and over-
lapping ranges of the harp, keyboards, and percussion
instruments obliterate any sense of melodic continuity
in favour of a massed texture (Figure 6). Pitch proximity
can also be a strong factor in situations where most notes
assimilate into a mass, but a few ‘outliers’ are marked to
segregate into a separate stream. For example, in section
5 of Lutosławski’s Symphony No. 2, the three flutes play
at independent tempi in an overlapping middle register
at a relatively low dynamic level, promoting strong inte-
gration. After this texture has been established, the flutes
occasionally interject high B-flats and A-naturals played
staccato and forte, which split off distinctly into a separate
stream.
3.6. Pitch co-modulation principle
The perceptual union of concurrent tones is encouraged
when pitch motions are positively correlated. Perceptual
fusion is most enhanced when the correlation is precise
with respect to log frequency. (p. 21)
This principle, along with the tonal fusion principle, pro-
vides the basis for that most famous of voice-leading
rules: the ban on parallel fifths and octaves. Huron,
drawing from experiments by Stephen McAdams (1984,
1989), states that synchronous, similar motion between
parts causes them to group or fuse perceptually; the ten-
dency is stronger when the motion is parallel, preserving
not only contour but exact pitch intervals. Harmonic par-
allelism has been used in some music that would not
normally be associated with sound mass but that never-
theless exploits similar fusion-based aesthetic goals, such
as some passages of Ravel’s Boléro (1928). It is an audi-
tory adaptation of the Gestalt ‘law of common fate’ which
Emilios Cambouropoulos and Costas Tsougras describe
thus: ‘objects that move together tend to be connected
to each other and grouped together’ (2009, pp. 123–24).
Semblant motion between lines is a musical example of
common fate motion, but not the only one: other types
of coherent motion can cause parts to group perceptu-
ally as well. For example, the ‘Shepard Tone’ creates an
illusion of perpetual descent through its deployment of

Figure 6. Penderecki, Dimensions of Time and Silence, rehearsals 9–10.
partials or pitches, with new sounds appearing at the
top to replace those that disappear off the bottom in
a kind of musical barber shop pole. Although an ide-
alised synthetic Shepard Tone will preserve frequency
ratios exactly, there are many musical examples in which
a similar effect is achieved with only approximate corre-
spondence between the trajectories of the parts, as seen
at rehearsal L in Georg Friedrich Haas’s Hyperion (2006).
3.7. Onset synchrony principle
If a composer intends to write music in which the parts
have a high degree of perceptual independence, then syn-
chronous note onsets ought to be avoided. Onsets of
nominally distinct sounds should be separated by 100 ms
or more. (p. 40)
Huron notes that synchronous onsets between parts can
promote fusion, as sounds that begin together tend to
group together. Whereas synchronous onsets in poly-
phonic textures can be a detriment to the perceptual
independence of concurrent lines, in sound mass they
provide an effective way to promote perceptual fusion.
Onset synchrony is especially characteristic of what Moe
Touizrar and McAdams (in press) refer to as ‘punctuation
blend,’ which occurs when several instruments articulate
JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH 243
notes with simultaneous onsets, short duration, and often
a high dynamic for accentuation. Punctuation blend is
well-illustrated at rehearsal 34 of Lutosławski’s Dou-
ble Concerto for Oboe, Harp, and Chamber Orchestra
(1980) (Figure 7).
3.8. Principle of limited density
If a composer intends to write music in which indepen-
dent parts are easily distinguished, then the number of
concurrent voices or parts ought to be kept to three or
fewer. (p. 46)
Huron explains that our ability to follow independent
musical lines follows an un, deux, trois, beaucoup pat-
tern: once the number of concurrent parts exceeds three,
our ability to follow them (or even to have a sense of
how many there are) decreases dramatically. Therefore, if
attenuating the perceptual salience of individual lines is
an aesthetic goal, a simple and much-exploited technique
is to have a large number of parts active at the same time.
Quintessential examples are found in Xenakis’s pioneer-
ing treatment of each string instrument as an individual
part in pieces such as Pithoprakta (1955–56); this prac-
tice was soon adopted by Penderecki and Ligeti. It is
important to note that the sheer number of parts does
244 J. NOBLE AND S. MCADAMS
Figure 7. Lutosławski, Double Concerto for Oboe, Harp, and Chamber Orchestra, rehearsal 34.
not in itself guarantee sound mass integration. If musi-
cal organisation emphasises collective properties such as
metrical synchronisation and tonal harmonic structure,
then sound mass fusion may be evaded even in music
with a large number of parts. Arnie Cox illustrates this
point with reference to Thomas Tallis’s 40-voice motet
Spem in Alium (1570):
The more complex the auditory scene, the greater the
challenge for mimetic comprehension. For example, in
the case of Tallis’s forty-voice motet ‘Spem in alium,’
when most or all of the voices are singing at once,
mimetic participation with particular voices becomes
largely impossible. And yet there is still a straightforward
mimetic invitation in connection with the composite
vocal exertions. The meter, rhythms, and tempo emerge
from a recurring general pattern of vocal exertions and
these combine with a shared strength (acoustic intensity)
and manner of articulation. At this level, mimetic partic-
ipation in effect is with the composite emergent musical
entity. (2016, pp. 49–50)
In this example, despite the large number of parts, the
emergent properties of the music in toto facilitate the kind
of segmental analytical listening (and, in the language of
embodied music cognition, ‘mimetic participation’) that
sound mass negates.
3.9. Timbral differentiation principle
If a composer intends to write music in which the parts
have a high degree of perceptual independence, then
each part should maintain a unique timbral character.
(p. 49)
As noted above, timbral homogeneity is a decisive factor
in sound mass fusion. Composers have intuitively under-
stood this, frequently either writing for timbrally homo-
geneous ensembles (e.g. string orchestras) or deploying
timbres in homogeneous subsets of mixed ensembles,
as, for example, Lutosławski does in his Cello Concerto
(1996). When attempting to achieve sound mass fusion

Figure 8. Xenakis, Terretektorh, seating plan.
with heterogeneous ensembles, dynamics, articulations,
and other playing techniques serve important roles. For
example, sounds played very softly and without vibrato
lose some of the cues that mark their timbral salience
and therefore allow them to blend more easily, as seen
at rehearsal 40 of Lutosławski’s Mi-Parti (1976). Alterna-
tively, the heterogeneity of ensemble timbres can be over-
whelmed with fortissimo dynamics and noise, as in the
tutti climax at rehearsal F of Toru Takemitsu’s Asterism
(1969).
The interaction between timbre and dynamics can
also be used to nuanced aesthetic effect, allowing for a
kind of timbral counterpoint in a heterogeneous massed
ensemble texture. Ligeti exploits this throughout Lontano
(1967), with timbral layers coming into the foreground
through crescendi before submerging back into a pianis-
simo massed ensemble texture: two striking moments of
this kind are the emergent foregrounding of the violins
in m. 11 which are then displaced by the flutes and oboes
a measure later, and the dramatic overturning from a
JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH 245
string-dominated to a brass-dominated timbral mass in
mm. 93–98.
3.10. Source location principle
If a composer intends to write music in which the parts
have a high degree of perceptual independence, then it is
helpful to separate in space the various sound sources for
each part. (p. 51)
This principle is less consistently applied than others in
both traditional and sound mass music, probably due
to logistical constraints. As Huron notes, while spatial
distribution is occasionally applied in antiphonal forma-
tions, performers of polyphonic music are often reluctant
to use dispersed locations even though this would help
preserve the perceptual independence of their parts. For
sound mass, the converse of the source location princi-
ple would imply that fusion is promoted by minimising
distance between performers, but since so many canon-
ical sound mass pieces are for large orchestras, there are
246 J. NOBLE AND S. MCADAMS
physical limits on how closely performers can be posi-
tioned. However, spatial positioning of sound sources
occasionally figures as an artistic parameter in sound
mass music, for example to create the illusion of spa-
tial movement. A famous example is Xenakis’s Terretek-
torh (1969), in which the musicians of the orchestra
are interspersed among the audience (Figure 8). In this
piece, according to Maria Anna Harley, ‘[t]he proximity
of the sound creates a new aural experience strength-
ened by the movement of sound masses in space’ (1994,
p. 300).
3.11. Addendum 1: event duration
Several other factors not directly addressed in the above
list deserve mention here. An additional important
aspect of sound mass, which frequently sets it in con-
tradistinction to conventional polyphonic practice, is
duration of its constituent sound events. Huron remarks
that the vast majority of notes in Western tonal music
are between 150 ms and 1 s in duration. Sound mass,
on the other hand, frequently employs vastly elongated
durations: the opening chord of Ligeti’s Atmosphères,
at the notated tempo of 40 bpm, lasts 24 s before the
first change in orchestration, and over three times that
long before the first chord change. At the opposite end
of the temporal spectrum, sound mass can be created
from very large numbers of very short sound events.
The shortest event that we can produce or perceive as
a rhythmic element is about 100 ms, corresponding to
a maximum rhythmic frequency of about 10 events per
second (Hz) (London, 2004, p. 27). At frequencies above
roughly 20 Hz, we perceive pitch. This leaves a region
that Edward Large (2015) has called a ‘no-man’s-land’
between 10 and 20 Hz: too slow to be perceived as pitch
and too fast to be perceived as rhythm. Auditory expe-
rience in this range can be ambiguous, characterised by
a rough kind of pseudo-continuity in which events are
neither clearly integrated nor clearly segregated. Perhaps
because of perceptual ambiguity and difficulty of produc-
tion, this liminal region traditionally played little role in
music (excepting ornamental figures like trills and drum-
rolls). However, it has been of great interest to sound
mass composers: for instance, Ligeti exploited the liminal
region between rhythm and pitch at length in his harpsi-
chord piece Continuum (1970), which consists of a steady
stream of notes to be played as fast as possible.
In the electronic technique of granular synthesis, there
are often no ‘parts’ as such but only brief, discon-
tinuous events, distributed stochastically. For example,
Barry Truax’s Riverrun (1987) is produced entirely with
very brief sine tones or frequency-modulated sine tones
(sometimes as short as 1 ms) distributed with geometrical
‘tendency masks’ over defined temporal and frequency
ranges (Truax, 1990). These are readily visible in a spec-
trograph of the piece, appearing as clearly-defined geo-
metrical shapes (Figure 9).
3.12. Addendum 2: rhythmic Irregularity
Another point not explicitly emphasised by Huron
(2001)9 is metrical regularity, which provides regular
accent patterns to which listeners can entrain, and a sim-
plifying framework for more complex surface rhythms.
Since clear metre promotes segmental listening – break-
ing up the music’s temporal continuity into strong and
weak beats, bars, and so forth – its aesthetic function may
run contrary to the fusion-based aesthetic of sound mass.
Many sound mass composers have avoided it accordingly,
for example by avoiding synchronised metres or pulses
between parts, even if there may be some implication
of pulse or metre within parts individually. Superpos-
ing multiple layers with different metres and/or inde-
pendent tempi will tend to override cues for metrical
entrainment provided by any given part, resulting in what
Jadwiga Paja has described as ‘diffusional aggregations’
and ‘polymorphic polyphony’ that create an ‘intermedi-
ate dimension’ between the horizontal and the vertical
(1990, pp. 186–89). This type of organisation is particu-
larly characteristic of Lutosławski’s ‘repeat cell’ sections,
quasi-indeterminate constructions that typically assign
each musician a cell of musical material which they may
repeat freely at their own individual tempi, without coor-
dinating with the rest of the ensemble. The contents of
Lutosławski’s repeat cells usually feature rhythmic group-
ings of different lengths and accent patterns between the
players, as is the case at the beginning of Jeux vénitiens
(1960–61).
3.13. Addendum 3: source bonding
Another aspect of auditory perception not addressed
by Huron also deserves mention: source bonding, Smal-
ley’s term for recognition of a sound’s source cause. It
is relevant here because electronic technology makes it
possible to introduce recorded samples of ‘real-world’
sound masses, such as the sounds of herds of animals,
crowds of people, wind, water, and various other envi-
ronmental sources into a musical context. This has been
an important feature of electroacoustic compositional
practices such as musique concrète and soundscape com-
position. For example, in Trevor Wishart’s Vox 5 (1986), a
human voice phonating on a voiced alveolar fricative /z/
9 Huron addresses this issue extensively elsewhere, however. See, for example,
Sweet Anticipation (2006, pp. 175–202).

Figure 9. Spectrograph of Barry Truax’s Riverrun.
transforms into the sound of a swarm of bees and then
back into a human voice.
4. Conclusion
This essay has distinguished two expansions of post-
tonal music: an expanded range of combinations of
tones in ‘post-tonality,’ and an expanded palette of sonic
resources in ‘post-tone’ music. It has focused on the
latter, which, in displacing the tone as the de facto fun-
damental unit of music, has enabled an emancipated,
primary role for musical parameters traditionally consid-
ered to be secondary, especially timbre. A turning point
in the development of post-tone thinking occurred when
some composers in the 1950s and 1960s stopped think-
ing in terms of combinatorics of tones and turned instead
to global perceptual properties of masses of tones, or
sound masses. Although much has been written about
poietic technical methods and artistic goals of sound
mass composers, esthesic questions of sound mass per-
ception have largely been relegated to introspection and
intuition on the part of authors rather than empiri-
cally grounded study. To address this state of affairs, this
essay reviewed a corpus of extant definitions of sound
mass, reported some empirical findings that challenge the
emphases of that corpus, and offered a new definition
that departs from them in emphasising homogeneity, dif-
ferences between acoustical and perceptual density and
complexity, and resistance to segregation in one or more
musical parameters. To further explicate how masses
JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH 247
resist segregation, the perceptual principles identified
by Huron as grounding polyphonic voice leading were
reviewed, followed by several addenda. It was demon-
strated that in most cases sound mass exploits the same
principles in reverse, emphasising the musical totality by
exceeding or subverting the perceptual independence of
its concurrent parts.
It would be no overstatement to say that post-tone
thinking has revolutionised music, overturning our most
basic assumptions about what music is, how it is created,
how it behaves. The implications of this revolution are
clearer in the early years of the twenty-first century than
ever before, as contemporary and popular musics alike
focus ever-more on timbre, with vastly expanded elec-
tronic and acoustic resources granting musicians every-
where access to timbral combinations unimaginable in
even the recent past. We also have access to a broader
and richer understanding of music perception and cog-
nition than ever before, with an ever-expanding base of
experimental methods and empirical findings. This essay
has attempted to lay an empirically informed theoret-
ical foundation for understanding one important type
of timbre-based music, in the hopes that future study
will explore the suggestions made here through per-
ceptual experiments and musical analysis. Such stud-
ies could perhaps answer the pejorative or oversimpli-
fying connotations that have dogged the term ‘sound
mass’ in the past by highlighting the rich diversity of
musical gestalts that it can encompass, predicated on
percepts of density, simplicity, and homogeneity and
248 J. NOBLE AND S. MCADAMS
manifested in an enormously vast array of compositional
formations. Analyses could approach post-tone textures
through this lens, comparing them systematically on the
basis of perceptual principles and showing how juxtapo-
sitions and transformations of such textures may be used
in the deployment of musical form. Future work (cur-
rently underway) will also explore perceptual and cogni-
tive differences among sound mass types, demonstrating
how the exploitation of the different perceptual princi-
ples enumerated here may affect experiences of emotion,
meaning, and so forth. The ultimate hope is that such
studies will provide clearer insight to how sound mass
and other post-tone musics are perceived by audiences,
which would be invaluable to composers and perform-
ers seeking to engage audiences in the media-saturated
landscape of the twenty-first century.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for
valuable comments on the manuscript, as well as Bennett K.
Smith for programming the listening experiments, Channey
Phung for running subjects, and the members of the Music Per-
ception and Cognition Lab at McGill University for valuable
feedback.
Funding
This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada (RGPIN 312774) and the Fonds
de recherche du Québec—Société et culture (2017-SE-205667),
as well as a Canada Research Chair (950-223484) awarded to
Stephen McAdams and a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship
(770-2012-0129) awarded to Jason Noble.
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