A Vuza canon (named after it’s inventor, the mathematician Dan Tudor Vuza) is a rhythmic canon which has the following properties: each beat is occupied by only one note; once all the voices have entered, every beat will be occupied.
Once every voice has entered, the perception of the music becomes ambiguous. “One listener focusing on polyphony would listen to the entry and the character of each voice, while another listener focusing on the global perception would hear a continuous monody.” (Fabien Levy)
The five electronic canons present the same paradox, across a range of variable elements. These elements being: tempo (60 to 880 bpm); number of voices (6 to 22); number of beats in the theme (72 to 680); number of notes in the theme (12 to 68); type of sound synthesis (sine tones, sawtooth waves). Despite the sometimes quite drastic differences in content, the canons are all the same length (2 minutes) and they all share the same structure: the first voice presents the theme once, the second voice enters and plays the theme entirely, then them the third voice starts, and so on, until the last voice plays the theme once, at which point the canon ends.
Depending on the speed of the tempo, the complexity grows. The faster canons, with a pattern of 20 milliseconds get close to our perception threshold of discontinuity between two sounds. The piece is no longer a succession of discrete bits but a continuous flow. Monody becomes sonic texture.