Like much modern music

Usage examples of atonal.

Onstage, he spoke with a British inflection, but Carter guessed from the atonal twang he heard leaking through that Mysterioso was a Cornhusker or a Hoosier.

The plotless story is rather like free verse, or abstract art, or atonal music.

Nobody stopped work to listen, though, because Onofre had always been a lousy piano player, even with two hands, and he still tunked out basically atonal numbers.

The necks of the squad wove a complex pavane, sauroid mouths opening and closing in a constant low atonal hiss that was almost a chant.

That pounding, frenetic, unmelodic heavy-metal rock was a collection of monotonous chords and even more monotonous atonal rims, so soul-less and mind-numbing that it might have been the music produced by a civilization of intelligent machines long after man had passed from the face of the earth.

From the ziggurats along the sides a stirring, almost atonal chant arose.

A small drum-frame was beaten, an atonal pipe wailed and the troop formed up with magical swiftness in ranks of three: baggage carts in the middle of the troop with the skurrai packbeasts behind.

The garden was loud with talk and laughter, with the atonal songs of Peir-Dadeni and the Kyre.

Some of them danced and cavorted now in the roadway, setting up a ragged, tuneless chanting, formless and atonal, like the droning of huge insects.

Folks coughed and sneezed through the announcements, the passing of the collection plate, and a solo sung by an atonal teenaged girl.

It bubbled with glottal stops and atonal whistles, and was beautiful enough, though few human audiences would have been able to discern a lullaby.

We passed a ramshackle green building which from the sounds of bells and atonal singing rising from an inner courtyard gave the impression of being a temple.

The noise hit me like a power hammer: thumping atonal music blasting away against wildly overamped screeching from some androgynous singer wailing the latest pop hit.

He noted that Sivdar, usually an atonal public speaker, now employed a voice that was cold but seductive.

He walked aimlessly for a few blocks, pausing to look at a window here, a holographic display there, a street vendor selling exquisite alien stone carvings, a psychic forecasting the fall of the Democracy, a street musician of an unknown race playing an atonal but haunting melody on a string instrument of strange design.