The art of being ambiguous: From listening to composing

To explain the processes involved when making sounds into music, in the first three parts of this paper the author discusses how traditional syntactic devices help to emphasize cognitive relationships between sounds. In other words, these devices are based on various ways of grouping sounds.Due in good part to the gradual abandoning of traditional syntactic devices, many composers today are basing their sound‐structuring more and more on the expressive aspects of sounds, rather than the internal and abstract relationships that group sounds together. This tendency seems to make their music less abstract and more expressive in character.In this context, the author explains in the fourth part of this article his own empirical approach to composition, which consists, after all, in grouping sounds. Using examples from his own works, he illustrates how he has been able to write music of a certain abstractness and ambiguity, by applying conventional syntactic devices in a thoroughly empirical and non‐traditional way, a way that is based on his own ‘listening experience’.