His skill in conjuring a wide range of harmonic and instrumental atmospheres evokes a French countryside throbbing with tales of love and woe.
Though few depart from a standardised and simple formal design – a single movement in two repeated halves – their virtuoso techniques and quirky surprises mark them out as the work of a highly active imagination, while their rhythmic vigour, harmonic sensuousness, open air excitement and drowsy lyricism seem a clear response to the seductive atmosphere of his adopted Spanish homeland.
When the chorus takes off, a wall of muscular harmonics assaults and batters the atmosphere, creating palpable, visible sonic disturbances that defy gravity.
In situations requiring long distance communication, lower frequency calls with fewer harmonics would propagate through the atmosphere more efficiently (Lawrence and Simmons, 1982).
This was not a folk-rock crowd, or an atmosphere for acute lyrical or harmonic consideration.
Even here, though, there's more generalised atmosphere than memorable content, and the dense harmonic curtains hang heavily right to the final chord.
To determine the depths of these flows, Yohai Kaspi and colleagues analyse the odd gravitational harmonics and find that the J3, J5, J7 and J9 harmonics are consistent with the jets extending deep into the atmosphere, perhaps as far as 3,000 kilometres.
As the orchestration wavers between the delicacy of Ravel and the terror of Berg, the harmonic writing turns the screws of dissonance, creating a closed-in, panicky atmosphere.
Global atmosphere and ionosphere models may use spectral methods based on spherical harmonic functions.
