Resultant Texture

Micropolyphony is a well fit name for the technique.

In biology microscopic creatures are life forms having all their own, sometimes fairly complex structures, individual lives and behaviors. They appear to naked eye only as a (questionable) volume of liquid, solid or gas.

Micropolyphony is similarly a mass of a musical texture made of a high number of individual parts which can not be distingished as such.

Actually white noise can be thought as the ultimate micropolyphony for it is made of a great number of random sine waves at random amplitudes and frequencies. Yet it is not ``polyphony'', it is noise.

That is precisely because of its random nature. Furthermore filtered noise is still noise up to the point where the filtering goes deeper on and reduce the mass to only distinct waves which then appear as they (still) are: random waves.

The most important aspect of the Micropolyphony procedure of Ligeti is that it is actually composed in all its aspects, not a random process at all. In this sense it differs considerably from similar procedures used by some composers notably by Iannis Xenakis^2.1