THE ELECTRONIC WORKS OF GYÖRGY LIGETI AND THEIR ...

direction within this span. The right channel (originally the front channel) consists of three
noises in a clear descent. The first two elements are downward glissandi of filtered noise
and are accompanied by harmonic upper partials–a characteristic very similar to the
beginning of Region E; the first element has a fundamental around 733 and upper partial
resembling the third partial at 2195 Hz, and the second at 443 with a partial at 1445.
The last of these three right channel gestures is somewhat different in material,
lower, with no harmonic partials, and level rather than oblique. It does, however seem
naturally assimilated into the succession since it continues two trends. The first of these
three gestures is the highest and glisses upwards the most quickly, the second, begins
lower and glisses at a slower rate, and the third is the lowest, and, while actually not
glissing, seems like a continuation of the flattening out of the two previous glissandi. Thus
in the very short span of two seconds, we hear the transformation of oblique into level
quite clearly–again sounding like a very compressed version of ideas in Region E. Region
E began with two noise-based glissandi and continued with level but scattered material;
here the descending noise glissandi and the scattered level impulses are presented together,
but in opposite channels.
Event 2
The following events (Events 2 and 3) continue this trend towards mixture and
transformation. Event 2 is quite diversely constructed; it begins with very richly
constructed spectra, mixed with impulses to achieve a noisy sound, but moves to more
widely spaced spectra and impulses at the end. Thus appearing to move along the
spectrum from noise to pitch but doing this by altering richness and spacing of partials.
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