Ausmultiplikation is a German term used by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...

 to describe a technique

Musical technique

Musical technique is the ability of instrumental and vocal musicians to exert optimal control of the their instrument or vocal cords in order to produce the precise musical effects they desire. Improving one's technique generally entails practicing exercises that improve one's muscular sensitivity...

 in which a long note

Note

In music, the term note has two primary meanings:#A sign used in musical notation to represent the relative duration and pitch of a sound;#A pitched sound itself....

 is replaced by shorter, "melodic

Melody

A melody , also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones which is perceived as a single entity...

 configurations internally animated around central tones", resembling the ornamental technique of divisions

Ornament (music)

In music, ornaments or embellishments are musical flourishes that are not necessary to carry the overall line of the melody , but serve instead to decorate or "ornament" that line. Many ornaments are performed as "fast notes" around a central note...

 (also called "diminutions") in Renaissance music

Renaissance music

Renaissance music is European music written during the Renaissance. Defining the beginning of the musical era is difficult, given that its defining characteristics were adopted only gradually; musicologists have placed its beginnings from as early as 1300 to as late as the 1470s.Literally meaning...

. Stockhausen first described this technique in connection with his "opus 1", Kontra-Punkte, composed in 1952–53 (Stockhausen 1989, 323–24), but in his later formula composition

Formula composition

Formula composition is a serially-derived technique encountered principally in the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, involving the projection, expansion, and Ausmultiplikation of either a single melody-formula, or a two- or three-voice contrapuntal construction .In contrast to serial music, where the...

 there is a related method of substituting a complete or partial formula for a single very long tone in a much slower, "more background

Musical form

The term musical form refers to the overall structure or plan of a piece of music, and it describes the layout of a composition as divided into sections...

" projection of the formula.