In this paper, a multiple-pulse signaling format for M-ary equicorrelated modulation (ECM) is proposed to enable the noncoherent detection on a multiple-symbol basis. Several time-limited and band-limited basis waveform sets are designed to embody the multiple-pulse ECM signals and explored to determine the spectral performance characteristics. Based on the maximum-likelihood decision principle, a block receiver is developed for noncoherently demodulating multiple-pulse ECM signals on additive white Gaussian noise channels. Tight upper and approximate bounds are derived and verified by simulation to evaluate the bit and symbol error probability characteristics of the developed ECM block receiver. It is analytically shown that the noncoherent M-ary ECM block receiver with a small-sized blocklength offers comparable performance to the ideal coherent M-ary simplex receiver when the pairwise signal correlation is appropriately chosen. In particular, the proposed noncoherent nonbinary simplex modulation is found to strongly outperform the conventional noncoherent nonbinary orthogonal modulation in terms of both power and spectral efficiencies.