How does granular synthesis work?

The Studio
1

Moar meat and potatoes posts…

I think its taking bits and pieces of the transients of the sound and retriggering the different transients and modulating the duration and speed of the retrigger in addition to which transients are getting retriggered and when.

Correct me if im wrong.:grin:

2 Likes
2

It’s just samples that are divided into tiny bits of information, down to the millisecond. Kind like very high-resolution time stretching.

2 Likes
3

Yup! Thats pretty much the gist of it. To build off of what Nick said There are always ways you can control how the grains behave as well, usually including at least:

  • how long each individual grain is
  • how many grains per second
  • where in the audio grain sampling begins
  • what direction the grains are played in
  • The shape of the individual grains: they can be like squares, triangles, ramps, or other algorithmic shapes of various kinds. For instance, UVI Falcon’s IRCAM granular has options for Triangle, Hanning (a cosine that starts and ends at zero amplitude, which gives you a very smooth sound) Welch (which is sort of between a Triangle and Hanning), and square shaped grains.

I use granular synths and effects in most of my projects, including UVI’s IRCAM Granular and Multi-Granular engines in Falcon, and Output’s Portal.

Also, I like these kinda baseline “what is this thing and how does it work?” threads you’ve been starting. They would potentially be a good resource for folks looking to learn more about synthesis (and likely other things as well). I’ll keep contributing to the places where I am knowledgeable.

2 Likes
4

otherwise known as “windowing”

Agreed!

2 Likes
6

I use Novum and Abyss plugins for atmospheric pads and drones. Great user interface but a bit of a CPU muncher. Eats up your free time, too as as the sound design process is very absorbing and great fun.

3 Likes