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Xenakis/Gestalt

Xenakis' interest in gestalt experience stemmed from his participation in political activities in Greece. He noticed that crowds of demonstrators had an aggregate sound which was more than just the sum of the individual voices.

Through his study of Jakob Bernoulli's Law of Large Numbers, he learned that gestalt perceptions of multiple sounds were not so much dependent on the constituent sound events but on their relative concentrations and distributions.