Granular Synthesis Workshop

Granular Synthesis Workshop

Workshop Materials

Mix Tape

20th Century

Listen to Side A Étude pathétique - Pierre Schaeffer Hugh Le Caine - Dripsody Concret PH - Iannis Xenakis Analogique A-B - Iannis Xenakis Kontakte - Karlheinz Stockhausen Klang-1 - Curtis Roads Riverrun (excerpt) - Barry Truax The Wings of Nike - Barry Truax Idle Chatter - Paul Lansky Store Check - Oval Noisegate (Remix) - Granular-Synthesis

21st Century

Listen to Side B Eleventh Vortex - Curtis Roads Vordhosbn - Aphex Twin Sumiya - Carl Stone Chorus - Holly Herndon VI Scose Poise- Autechre Radian - Kelly Moran Endless Summer - Fennesz Score Tae the Toor - Tommy Perman, Simon Kirby & Rob St. John The Rust Belt - Matmos Whirlpool - Lisel Epílogo - Damian Anache

Software

Further Reading

Further Listening

  • Horacio Vagione
  • Luciano Berio
  • Denis Smalley
  • François Bayle
  • Erik Nyström

Notes

  • 1822 | Joseph Fourier publishes The Analytical Theory of Heat which showed a method to describe complex phenomena, like the pattern of heat flow through metal objects, as a combination of simple sine waves.
    • Fourier validated the theory through measurement. He compared mathematical predictions of temperature change to real thermometer readings along heated rods.
    • This led to the insight that any signal which changes over time could be expressed as a sum of simpler oscillations.
  • 1862 | Hermann Von Helmholtz publishes “On the Sensation of Tone”, proving the first experimental validations of Fourier’s theory in acoustics.
    • Using specially designed spherical resonators tuned to specific frequencies, Helmholtz could isolate individual harmonics within complex sounds by ear.
    • By using multiple tuned resonators in parallel, Helmholtz was able to identify the spectral makeup of different instruments and confirmed that complex tones are composed of simpler sinusoidal components.
    • This demonstrated the real-world applicability of Fourier analysis to sound perception.
    • Everybody in this room has used a Helmholtz resonator by blowing over the mouth of a bottle.
  • 1947 | Dennis Gabor defines the acoustic quanta: the smallest useful unit of sound.
    • The Fourier transform gave us a way to analyze the frequencies existing within a sound overall, but has no time-based analysis.
    • The Gabor transfer adds a time based window, allowing us to analyze frequencies at specific moments or in series.
    • Gabor’s work inspired us to think about micro-time events. Sounds in the 1 to 100ms length.
    • Gabor was not a composer, but this way of thinking about sound inspired other (who we’ll discuss shortly) to consider micro-sound as a potential compositional too.
  • 1948 | Pierre Schaeffer - Musique Concrète
    • Anticipated by Igor Stravinsky, Henry Cowell and others, Pierre Schaeffer gave us the name Musique Concrète.
    • Traditionally, recording technology had been used to capture and recreate (as faithfully as possible) the sounds of the source material, typically traditional instrumentation and arrangements. This can be considered a first order transformation (original sound -> derived recording).
    • Schaeffer’s innovation was to treat recorded sound itself as raw musical material and open the gates to any kind of sound.
    • By cutting, looping, reversing, and layering tape, he introduced a second-order transformation—composing with sounds directly—expanding the definition of what could be considered musically meaningful.
    • Schaeffer’s notion of the “sound object” emphasized perception over source, foreshadowing later ideas of sound as discrete, manipulable particles.
    • Now let’s listen to an excerpt of one of his early compositions.
  • 1955 | Hugh Le Caine - Multi-Track & Dripsody
    • Le Caine was something of a garage inventor as well as very occasional composer.
    • His most well known work is called Dripsody and is formed entirely from a single sample of water dripping into a pail.
    • Le Caine built several generations of the “Multi-track”, which he used to alter pitch, create loop and layers.
    • Sequencing was done manually by cutting and splicing.
    • Dripsody emerges from the mustique concrete tradition and anticipates many granular and sample-based techniques to come.
  • 1958 | Iannis Xenakis - Concret PH
    • Iannis Xenakis is considered to the be creator of what we now consider granular synthesis.
    • Concret PH can be thought of as the first branching off point from musique concret to a granular form of composition.
    • Concrete PH is build from one second fragments of recordings of wood burning.
    • The fragments are layered and organized to create the impression of a more unified sonic texture.
    • There is change throughout the piece, but not the big transitions we heard in the earlier Schaeffer work.
  • 1959 | Iannis Xenaxis - Analogique A-B
    • Iannis Xenakis built upon the ideas in Concret PH by connecting the aesthetic ideas to the ideas of Dennis Gabor, giving us the term “grains of sound” along the way.
    • Analogique A-B has two elements. The A part is played on traditional stringed instruments. B was produced by recording sine waves from tone generators.
    • Both A and B use a stochastic, or statistically derived means of composition.
    • The grains in Analogique B were distributed across the time horizon of the score by dividing it into a series of ‘frames’ and building a statistical and logical framework to govern the generation of subsequent frames and the amount of change they would introduce.
    • The version we will hear unites both A and B.
    • “All sound, even continuous musical variation, is conceived as an assemblage of a large number of elementary sounds adequately disposed in time. In the attack, body, and decline of a complex sound, thousands of pure sounds appear in a more or less short interval of time delta”
  • 1960 | Stockhausen - Kontakte
    • Composed of sine tones, filtered noise and impulses (short, percussive clicks), Kontakte was built with entirely synthetic source material (not the first to do this).
    • Stockhausen pointed out that rhythms and pitch exist on the same continuum.
      • If you speed up rhythmic pulses enough, they become pitch.
      • If you slow down pitch, it becomes rhythm.
    • Kontake demonstrates this repeatedly as pitches are decomposed and recomposed in various configurations.
  • 1974 | Curtis Roads Klang-1
    • Curtis Roads studies with Xenakis in the late 1960s and became interested in granular synthesis.
    • He recorded the first digitally constructed granular compositions in the mid 1970s, an example of which we will hear through this video.
    • Roads continued to use granular elements in his compositions throughout the later 70s and 80s, but these always required asynchronous processing. The composer would write a program to generate sound material and it would be executed by the computer.
  • 1986 | Barry Truax - Riverrun
    • Working at Simon Fraser University in BC, Barry Truax developed the first real-time granular synthesizer called GSX using the DMX-1000 DSP.
    • GSX allowed the user to adjust key parameters including the synthetic sound source, grain envelope, frequency, density and panning. It supported frequency modulation and used mutli-stage ramps over different parameters to modulate the characteristics of each attribute over time.
    • His most recognized recording from this period is Riverrun. We’ll listen to an expert and then watch a clip of Truax explaining how GSX worked.
  • 1992 | Barry Truax - The Wings of Nike
    • The limitation of GSX was its reliance upon synthetic source material. As we saw earlier, we can divide granular synthesis into tow camps. Synthetic grains are built from simple waveforms, often sine waves. Frequency modulation and other techniques can alter the timbre, but you are still working with source material that can sound predictable.
    • Truax’s next innovation was to build a realtime granular processor of arbitrary sound material. This is a form of delayed sampling. The grains are extracted from any sound material, which radically alters the available timbre of the source material.
    • In the second piece on his album, Pacific, we hear what may be voice recordings granularized and modulated. Lets give it a listen.
    • If you’re like me, there is a different kind of engagement here. I feel as if I am always at the edge of understanding, and my brain is trying to reconstruct the samples.
  • 1995ish | Curtis Roads Cloud Generator
    • Cloud Generator is a granular app for MacOS 9 that supported both synthetic and granulated synthesis.
    • Over the following decades, Roads would refine the ideas here through a few different desktop applications, the most recent of which is called EmissionControl2. We’ll spend some time getting to know that very soon.
  • 2015 | Émilie Gillet Clouds
    • I’ll end this history portion with the reason I suspect many of us here became interested in Granular Synthesis, which is the Clouds module by Mutable Instruments.
    • Clouds was not the first hardware granulator, and was preceded by a few Eurorack modules, but it was the first to take granular synthesis mainstream in Eurorack.
    • Since Clouds, we’ve seen tremendous growth in granular modules, hardware and software.