Music Listening, Music Therapy, Phenomenology and Neuroscience

The Musical Timespace

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A few years after composing Metastasis, Xenakis was asked by Le

Corbusier to suggest a design for the architecture of the Philips Pavilion

for the World Exhibition in Brussels. Xenakis took up the Metastasis idea

of ruled surfaces and transferred it back to architecture, designing and

calculating the walls of the Pavilion as ruled surfaces. Fig. 2.2. shows a first

model of the Philips Pavilion, which was built in reinforced concrete in

In this building, the sounds of Edgar Varèse's Poème electronique were

heard from 350 loudspeakers in the curved walls. After the exhibition, the
Pavilion was demolished.

Atmospheres - A vibrating space of timbre and movement

The composition of events, states and transformations is developed and

refined in Ligeti's orchestral work Atmospheres (1961). This is music without

melodic or rhythmic gestalts, and without clearly discernible pitches and

durations. Atmospheres is a flow of sound. Subtle changes in timbre,

intensity and movement create auditory impressions of variable sound

masses appearing and disappearing, approaching,