Granular Synthesis

A sophisticated (and esoteric) form of additive synthesis (see WFTD archive Additive Synthesis) combining sound elements called “grains,” which are used to make up sonic “events.” Events are time sliced into “screens” that end up containing the amplitude and frequency dimensions of hundreds of events. Very complex sounds can be created using this technique, but the computational power required to generate them is so great that it has not been practical to use this form of synthesis in any commercially available hardware machines.