So by combining thousands of grains we can create a continuous spectrum and sonic texture. By presenting a series of slightly different still images at a rate that is just about the limit of the eye’s response to changes, the impression is one of a smooth continuous movement.” (Russ 294) This is “somewhat analogous to the way film projectors work. In all cases, grains can be overlapped and delayed, and “spectral side effects can distort and enrich the sound in a controllable way.” (Roads 184)Īmplitude envelopes are applied to grains which can be smoothly connected at zero-point crossings. Replication: where a grain is extracted and repeated Reordering: where grains are extracted and reordered Merging and Reordering: where grains are extracted from multiple sources and combined Some approaches to time granulation include: This type of time granulation as applied to sampled sounds should be distinguished from grain generation, which starts with a waveform, amplitude, starting time, and frequency. Once divided, each grain can be manipulated independently, reordered, reversed, etc. In the case of manipulating an existing sound, the file would be sliced or divided into grains. “Granular synthesis can be implemented with a simple synthesis instrument: a sine wave oscillator controlled by an envelope generator.” (Roads 171)Īs simple as this sounds, it could take thousands of parameters per second to describe each grain, which are chunks of sound, typically 1 to 100ms in duration. (Roads 168) Iannis Xenakis was the first composer to use granular ideas using analog tone generators and tape splicing. Likewise, a continuous sound can be composed from a collection of very short acoustic events. Overview of Granular SynthesisĬurtis Roads recognized that light can be observed as having both wavelike and particulate properties (photons). The most common uses are those that involve the real-time independent manipulation of sound file speed, pitch and duration such as in Melodyne, Auto-Tune, and Ableton’s warping functions to name a few. As processing speeds have increased exponentially, many virtual instruments and effects plugins have emerged that make use of this very powerful technique. ![]() Granular Synthesis, a method once restricted to offline processing due to the limitations of CPUs, is now prevalent and widely used in many plugins and DAWs.
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