Granular synthesis is a

sound synthesis A synthesizer (also spelled synthesiser) is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis and ...

method that operates on the microsound time scale. It is based on the same principle as sampling. However, the samples are split into small pieces of around 1 to 100 ms in duration. These small pieces are called grains. Multiple grains may be layered on top of each other, and may play at different speeds, phases, volume, and frequency, among other parameters. At low speeds of playback, the result is a kind of

soundscape A soundscape is the acoustic environment as perceived by humans, in context. The term was originally coined by Michael Southworth, and popularised by R. Murray Schafer. There is a varied history of the use of soundscape depending on discipline, ...

, often described as a cloud, that is manipulatable in a manner unlike that for natural sound sampling or other synthesis techniques. At high speeds, the result is heard as a note or notes of a novel

timbre In music, timbre ( ), also known as tone color or tone quality (from psychoacoustics), is the perceived sound quality of a musical note, sound or tone. Timbre distinguishes different types of sound production, such as choir voices and musica ...

. By varying the

waveform In electronics, acoustics, and related fields, the waveform of a signal is the shape of its graph as a function of time, independent of its time and magnitude scales and of any displacement in time.David Crecraft, David Gorham, ''Electronics ...

, envelope, duration, spatial position, and density of the grains, many different sounds can be produced. Both have been used for musical purposes: as sound effects, raw material for further processing by other synthesis or

digital signal processing Digital signal processing (DSP) is the use of digital processing, such as by computers or more specialized digital signal processors, to perform a wide variety of signal processing operations. The digital signals processed in this manner are a ...

effects, or as complete musical works in their own right. Conventional effects that can be achieved include

amplitude modulation Amplitude modulation (AM) is a modulation technique used in electronic communication, most commonly for transmitting messages with a radio wave. In amplitude modulation, the amplitude (signal strength) of the wave is varied in proportion to t ...

and time stretching. More experimentally, stereo or multichannel scattering, random reordering, disintegration and morphing are possible.

History

Greek composer

Iannis Xenakis Giannis Klearchou Xenakis (also spelled for professional purposes as Yannis or Iannis Xenakis; el, Γιάννης "Ιωάννης" Κλέαρχου Ξενάκης, ; 29 May 1922 – 4 February 2001) was a Romanian-born Greek-French avant-garde ...

is known as the inventor of the granular synthesis technique.

Curtis Roads Curtis Roads (born May 9, 1951) is an American composer, author and computer programmer. He composes electronic and electroacoustic music, specializing in granular and pulsar synthesis. Career and music Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Roads studied c ...

was the first to implement granular synthesis on a computer in 1974. Twelve years later, in 1986 the Canadian composer Barry Truax implemented real-time versions of this synthesis technique. "Granular synthesis was implemented in different ways by Truax."

Microsound

This includes all

sound In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid. In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' by the ...

s on the time scale shorter than

musical note In music, a note is the representation of a musical sound. Notes can represent the pitch and duration of a sound in musical notation. A note can also represent a pitch class. Notes are the building blocks of much written music: discretization ...

s, the

sound object In musique concrete and electronic music theory the term sound object (originally ''l'objet sonore'') is used to refer to a primary unit of sonic material and often specifically refers to recorded sound rather than written music using manuscript ...

time scale, and longer than the sample time scale. Specifically, this is shorter than one tenth of a

second The second (symbol: s) is the unit of time in the International System of Units (SI), historically defined as of a day – this factor derived from the division of the day first into 24 hours, then to 60 minutes and finally to 60 seconds each ...

and longer than 10

millisecond A millisecond (from ''milli-'' and second; symbol: ms) is a unit of time in the International System of Units (SI) equal to one thousandth (0.001 or 10−3 or 1/1000) of a second and to 1000 microseconds. A unit of 10 milliseconds may be called ...

s, which includes part of the audio

frequency Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit of time. It is also occasionally referred to as ''temporal frequency'' for clarity, and is distinct from ''angular frequency''. Frequency is measured in hertz The hertz ...

range (20Hz to 20kHz) as well as part of the

infrasonic Infrasound, sometimes referred to as low status sound, describes sound waves with a frequency below the lower limit of human audibility (generally 20 Hz). Hearing becomes gradually less sensitive as frequency decreases, so for humans to perce ...

frequency range (below 20Hz,

rhythm Rhythm (from Greek , ''rhythmos'', "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a " movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular rec ...

). Roads, Curtis (2001). ''Microsound'', p.vii and 20-28. Cambridge:

MIT Press The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publish ...

. . These sounds include transient audio phenomena and are known in

acoustics Acoustics is a branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician ...

and

signal processing Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focuses on analyzing, modifying and synthesizing ''signals'', such as sound, images, and scientific measurements. Signal processing techniques are used to optimize transmissions, d ...

by various names including sound particles,

quantum acoustics In physics, quantum acoustics is the study of sound under conditions such that quantum mechanical effects are relevant. For most applications, classical mechanics are sufficient to accurately describe the physics of sound. However very high frequen ...

sonal atom Sonal is a given Indian name originating from the Hindu religion. It is a unisex name often nicknamed as “Sona” and means "curious", "golden", or “precious” in Hindi, Marathi, and Gujarati. A similar name is Sonali. It is also a name used ...

, grain, glisson, grainlet, trainlet, microarc,

wavelet A wavelet is a wave-like oscillation with an amplitude that begins at zero, increases or decreases, and then returns to zero one or more times. Wavelets are termed a "brief oscillation". A taxonomy of wavelets has been established, based on the nu ...

, chirplet, ''fof'', time-frequency atom, pulsar, impulse, toneburst, tone pip, acoustic pixel, and others. In the frequency domain they may be named kernel, logon, and frame, among others. Physicist

Dennis Gabor Dennis Gabor ( ; hu, Gábor Dénes, ; 5 June 1900 – 9 February 1979) was a Hungarian-British electrical engineer and physicist, most notable for inventing holography, for which he later received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics. He obtained ...

was an important pioneer in microsound. Micromontage is musical montage with microsound. Microtime is the level of "sonic" or aural "

syntax In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency ...

" or the "time-varying distribution of... spectral energy".

Related software

Csound Csound is a domain-specific computer programming language for audio programming. It is called Csound because it is written in C, as opposed to some of its predecessors. It is free software, available under the LGPL-2.1-or-later. Csound was or ...

– comprehensive music software including granular synthesis
overview
of granular synthesis opcodes) *

Max/MSP Max, also known as Max/MSP/Jitter, is a visual programming language for music and multimedia developed and maintained by San Francisco-based software company Cycling '74. Over its more than thirty-year history, it has been used by composers, pe ...

– graphical authoring software for real-time audio and video *

Pure Data Pure Data (Pd) is a visual programming language developed by Miller Puckette in the 1990s for creating interactive computer music and multimedia works. While Puckette is the main author of the program, Pd is an open-source project with a large d ...

(Pd) – graphical programming language for real-time audio and video *

SuperCollider A particle accelerator is a machine that uses electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles to very high speeds and energies, and to contain them in well-defined beams. Large accelerators are used for fundamental research in particle ...

– programming language for real time audio synthesis

Related hardware

* Mutable Instruments Clouds – a digital, open source

eurorack Eurorack is a modular synthesizer format originally specified in 1995 by Doepfer Musikelektronik. It has since grown in popularity, and as of 2022 has become a dominant hardware modular synthesizer format, with over 15,000 modules available from ...

synthesizer module which has four factory set modes, the first and default being a granular processor * Make Noise Morphagene – a eurorack synthesizer moduler built around microsound, or granular synthesis, in addition to

Musique Concrète Musique concrète (; ): " problem for any translator of an academic work in French is that the language is relatively abstract and theoretical compared to English; one might even say that the mode of thinking itself tends to be more schematic, ...

-inspired sound on sound audio manipulation

References

Bibliography

Articles

"Granular Synthesis"
by Eric Kuehnl
"The development of GiST, a Granular. Synthesis Toolkit Based on an Extension of the FOF Generator"
by Gerhard Eckel and Manuel Rocha Iturbide
Searching for a global synthesis technique through a quantum conception of sound
by Manuel Rocha Iturbide
Further articles on Granular Synthesis
* Bencina, R. (2006) "Implementing Real-Time Granular Synthesis", in Greenbaum & Barzel (eds.), Audio Anecdotes III, , A.K. Peters, Natick
online pdf

Books

* * * *

Discography

*Curtis Roads (2004). CD witrh ''Microsounds''. MIT Press. . Contains excerpts of ''nscor'' and ''Field'' (1981). . **''nscor'' (1980), *Iannis Xenakis. Analogique A-B (1959), on and

External links

Granular Synthesis
Resource Web Site {{Sound synthesis types Sound synthesis types