THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

He then cut both the altered and unaltered texts back into mid-length segments,
termed “words.” Some words were further transformed with techniques such as
reverberation and ring modulation, in addition to the techniques already used to alter the
texts. Ligeti then treated the words as he did the sounds. He grouped them according to
their sonic characteristics, again putting similar sounds in bins. By repeating the process
of splicing bits of tape together and cutting them back into smaller segments, the stages of
which are shown in Table 3.2, Ligeti completed the piece.
Table 3.2. Levels of Compositional Process
sounds
texts
words
15Wehinger,
Ligeti – Artikulation, 19.
languages
101
sentences
Artikulation
In moving from words to languages, Ligeti used categories such as type of text,
duration and word-density, average register, average intensity, and presence of ring-
15 modulation to separate his recorded sounds into bins. Furthermore, Ligeti transformed
these sounds at each level, just as he had done with the words and texts; Wehinger, cites
instances where the sentences were interrupted, ring-modulated in their entirety or even
synchronized with other sentences before being combined into the final piece. Thus at
each step of the process, the sonic contents underwent substantial changes, not according
to any serial predetermination, but rather to Ligeti’s vision of the large-scale form of the