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

Abstract

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

KEYWORDS:

• Sound mass
• tone
• post-tone
• auditory perception
• music perception

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 Perception and Cognition Lab at McGill University for valuable feedback.

Notes

1 The term Klangfarbenmelodie has (at least) two different senses: Webernian 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).

3 Danuta Mirka makes a similar point: ‘while all the effort of the serialist composers was focused on individual tones, their audiences neglected that level of musical phenomena and concentrated instead on large sets of tones’ (1997, p. 6).

4 For ease of reference, numbers in square brackets in this section refer to Table I.

5 Thanks to John Rea for drawing our attention to this fact.

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.

7 Lasse Thoresen describes this situation as

a category in which the very complex and the very simple 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 opposites. It applies to objects with myriad details, but with a perceptually simple overall character. A homogenous accumulation … may often qualify for this category. (2015, p. 457)

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).

9 Huron addresses this issue extensively elsewhere, however. See, for example, Sweet Anticipation (2006, pp. 175–202).

Additional information

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.