Granular synthesis is a

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

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, originally coined by Michael Southworth, was popularized by R. Murray Schafer. There is a varied history of the use of soundscape depending on discipline, ...

, often described as a

cloud In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles, suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may ...

, that is manipulated in a manner unlike that of 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 of a musical note, sound or tone. Timbre distinguishes sounds according to their source, such as choir voices and musical instrument ...

. By varying the

waveform In electronics, acoustics, and related fields, the waveform of a signal is the shape of its Graph of a function, graph as a function of time, independent of its time and Magnitude (mathematics), magnitude Scale (ratio), scales and of any dis ...

, 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 signal modulation technique used in electronic communication, most commonly for transmitting messages with a radio wave. In amplitude modulation, the instantaneous amplitude of the wave is varied in proportion t ...

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

History

In 1947, Dennis Gabor introduced the idea that sounds can be represented by a series of elementary "grains," each grain being a short pulse containing both temporal and frequency information. Greek composer Iannis Xenakis is known as the inventor of the granular synthesis technique, having expanded upon Gabor's theoretical foundation. Curtis Roads was the first to implement granular synthesis on a computer in 1974. Twelve years later, in 1986, the Canadian composer

Barry Truax Barry Truax (born 1947) is a Canadian composer who specializes in real-time implementations of granular synthesis, often of sampled sounds, and soundscapes. He is credited with developing the first ever implementation of real-time granular s ...

implemented real-time versions of this synthesis technique using the DMX-1000 Signal Processing Computer. "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 br ...

s on the time scale shorter than

musical note In music, notes are distinct and isolatable sounds that act as the most basic building blocks for nearly all of music. This musical analysis#Discretization, discretization facilitates performance, comprehension, and musical analysis, analysis. No ...

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

second The second (symbol: s) is a unit of time derived from the division of the day first into 24 hours, then to 60 minutes, and finally to 60 seconds each (24 × 60 × 60 = 86400). The current and formal definition in the International System of U ...

and longer than 10

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

s, which includes part of the audio

frequency Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit of time. Frequency is an important parameter used in science and engineering to specify the rate of oscillatory and vibratory phenomena, such as mechanical vibrations, audio ...

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

infrasonic Infrasound, sometimes referred to as low frequency sound or incorrectly subsonic (subsonic being a descriptor for "less than the speed of sound"), describes sound waves with a frequency below the lower limit of human audibility (generally 20 Hz ...

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 r ...

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

MIT Press The MIT Press is the university press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The MIT Press publishes a number of academic journals and has been a pioneer in the Open Ac ...

. . 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 audio signal processing, sound, image processing, images, Scalar potential, potential fields, Seismic tomograph ...

by various names including sound particles, quantum acoustics, sonal atom, 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 n ...

, 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 ( ; ; 5 June 1900 – 9 February 1979) was a Hungarian-British physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971 for his invention of holography. He obtained British citizenship in 1946 and spent most of his life in Engla ...

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 (constituenc ...

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

Related software

Csound Csound is a domain-specific computer programming language for audio programming. It is named Csound because it is written in the language C, in contrast to some of its predecessors. It is free and open-source software, released under the GNU Les ...

– comprehensive music software including granular synthesis
overview
of granular synthesis opcodes) * Max/MSP – graphical authoring software for real-time audio and video * Pure Data (Pd) – graphical programming language for real-time audio and video *

SuperCollider SuperCollider is an environment and audio programming language released originally in 1996 by James McCartney for real-time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition.J. McCartneySuperCollider: A new real time synthesis language in Proc. Int ...

– programming language for real time audio synthesis *

ChucK Chuck () is a masculine given name or a nickname for Charles or Charlie. It may refer to: People Arts and entertainment * Chuck Alaimo, American saxophonist, leader of the Chuck Alaimo Quartet * Chuck Barris (1929–2017), American TV produce ...

- strongly-timed computer music programming language * EmissionControl2 - granular sound synthesizer

Related hardware

* Mutable Instruments Clouds – a digital, open source eurorack synthesizer module which has four factory set modes, the first and default being a granular processor. * Make Noise Morphagene – a eurorack synthesizer module 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. * Tasty Chips GR-1 - polyphonic granular synthesizer capable of 128 grains per voice, which can add up to a total of 1000+ grains simultaneously.

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 Manuel Rocha Iturbide (born 1963 in Mexico City) is a Mexican composer and sound artist. Biography Manuel Rocha Iturbide was born in 1963 in Mexico City. He started his musical studies when he was 13 years old. In 1983, after studying musical p ...

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 with ''Microsounds''. MIT Press. . Contains excerpts of ''nscor'' and ''Field'' (1981). . **''nscor'' (1980), *Iannis Xenakis. Analogique A-B (1959), on and *Truax, Barry (1987). Digital Soundscapes

External links

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