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Process music is a main form of musical minimalism, developed in the 1970s by Steve Reich and his followers. In it, the composer sets up a ‘process’: a pattern of notes or a rhythm which the performers repeat time after time to make the piece. The repetitions are, however, not all they seem. By phasing or phase shifting (the introduction of slight distortions into the pattern) the composer subtly and minutely varies what we hear. The effect is similar to heterophony, in that an apparently stable sound-sequence appears to blur and shift even as we perceive it. Process music simultaneously lulls the brain (by repetition) and stimulates it, and in some listeners, the refractions produced by phase shifting induce aural hallucination: they hear secondary melodies, secondary rhythms inside the main texture, aural mirages. KMcL
See also metre. |
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