Process music
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Process music, often used synonymously with minimalist music, is specifically music which arises from a process, and more specifically, music which makes that process audible.
A number of Steve Reich's early works are examples of process music, particularly a specific process called phase or phasing. In his 1968 work Pendulum Music, a number of microphones are connected to a number of loudspeakers, and each is allowed to swing freely above the louspeaker it is connected to until it is still - the feedback that results from this process, as each microphone passes above its loudspeaker, makes up the music (see also Reich's short 1968 essay Music as a Gradual Process). Gyoergy Ligeti's Poeme symphonique (1962), in which a hundred metronomes are set to different tempos and allowed to run down is another notable example.
Process music can also be created using relatively traditional instrumental techniques - Reich's Piano Phase is an example. James Tenney is another composer who is concerned with process, such as in his tribute to Steve Reich, Chromatic Canon, in which a tone row is eventually built up and, one note at a time, from what started as a repeated open fifth, before returning by the same path.
Michael Nyman has described how the generally minimalistic tonal music associated with process music arose from the influence of and reaction against process based music of extreme determinism or indeterminism using serial, aleatoric, and stochastic methods.
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