The evolution of granular synthesis: an overview of current research
Curtis Roads · 2006
This lecture presents an overview of several projects pursued over the past five years in our laboratories at Santa Barbara. All this research is based on a scientific model of sound initially proposed by Dennis Gabor (1946), and soon afterward extended to music by Iannis Xenakis (1960). Granular analysis (also called atomic decomposition) and granular synthesis have evolved over more than five decades from a paper theory and primitive experiments into a broad range of applied techniques. Specific to the granular model is its focus on the microacoustic time scale (typically 1 to 100 ms). Granular methods treat sound as a stream of acoustic particles in both the time domain and the time-frequency (TF) domain. For more details, see Roads (2002; Kling, et al. 2005).