thumb|350px|Olivier Messiaen's unordered series for pitch, duration, dynamics, and articulation from the pre-serial ''Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, upper division only—which [[Pierre Boulez adapted as an ordered row for his Structures I'']]
thumb|350px|Olivier Messiaen's unordered series for pitch, duration, dynamics, and articulation from the pre-serial ''Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, upper division only—which [[Pierre Boulez adapted as an ordered row for his Structures I]]
Punctualism (commonly also called "pointillism" or "point music") is a style of musical composition prevalent in Europe between 1949 and 1955 "whose structures are predominantly effected from tone to tone, without superordinate formal conceptions coming to bear". In simpler terms: "music that consists of separately formed particles—however complexly these may be composed—[is called] punctual music, as opposed to linear, or group-formed, or mass-formed music", bolding in the source). This was accomplished by assigning to each note in a composition values drawn from scales of pitch, duration, dynamics, and attack characteristics, resulting in a "stronger individualizing of separate tones". Another important factor was maintaining discrete values in all parameters of the music. Punctual dynamics, for example mean that all dynamic degrees are fixed; one point will be linked directly to another on the chosen scale, without any intervening transition or gesture. Line-dynamics, on the other hand, involve the transitions from one given amplitude to another: crescendo, decrescendo and their combinations. This second category can be defined as a dynamic glissando, comparable to glissandi of pitch and of tempi (accelerando, ritardando).
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).