{"id":1081,"date":"2018-10-22T12:12:48","date_gmt":"2018-10-22T12:12:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/digital.eca.ed.ac.uk\/sonicstructures\/?p=1081"},"modified":"2019-11-06T20:51:57","modified_gmt":"2019-11-06T20:51:57","slug":"tutorial-granulation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digital.eca.ed.ac.uk\/sonicstructures\/2018\/10\/tutorial-granulation\/","title":{"rendered":"Tutorial – granulation"},"content":{"rendered":"

At this tutorial, we’ll look in detail at some techniques for playing back samples in novel ways. In particular, we’ll explore granulation using 3rd party externals and building our own abstractions.  Bring headphones and a laptop with MaxMSP installed on it if you have one.<\/p>\n

To save you scrolling here are the grain players we built in class together<\/p>\n

grainTutorialsBuiltInClass<\/a><\/p>\n

The tutorial<\/h3>\n

1<\/span> Introducing Grains<\/h2>\n
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\u201cAll sound is an integration of grains, of elementary sonic particles, of sonic quanta\u2026All sound, even continuous musical variation, is conceived as an assemblage of a large number of elementary sounds adequately disposed in time.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

xenakis_formalized_1992<\/a><\/p>\n

Granular approach to processing sound was proposed by the physicist Dennis Gabor. His thinking was much along the same lines as Fourier’s proposition that all sound can be described in a certain way. In Fourier’s case, the proposition is that any signal can be described in terms of discrete sine waves, all added together with differing phase positions and amplitudes. This is aligned with a reading of the universe of sound as being wave-like. Gabor’s proposal is that we can regard the universe of sound as being composed of sonic quanta or particles and that any sound can be synthesised or created by organising the quanta in specific ways.<\/p>\n

In reality both approaches have limitations, even amongst the ultrafast computers we have access to, but they both offer extremely interesting options to the sonic artist.<\/p>\n

Today we focus on a particular granulation technique: time-based granulation of sampled sound.<\/p>\n

To do this we’ll need a number of important tools:<\/p>\n