Abstract
We show a method for Granular Synthesis Composition based on a mathematical modeling for the musical gesture. Each gesture is drawn as a curve generated from a particular mathematical model (or function) and coded as a MATLAB script. The gestures can be deterministic through defining mathematical time functions, hand free drawn, or even randomly generated. This parametric information of gestures is interpreted through OSC messages by a granular synthesizer (Granular Streamer). The musical composition is then realized with the models (scripts) written in MATLAB and exported to a graphical score (Granular Score). The method is amenable to allow statistical analysis of the granular sound streams and the final music composition. We also offer a way to create granular streams based on correlated pair of grains parameters.
Highlights
We show a method for Granular Synthesis Composition based on a mathematical modeling for the musical gesture
Granular Streamer can run many simultaneous streams, which is configured to synthesize grains with a specific type of wave and envelope; frequency: the frequency of the wave inside the grain; duration: duration of the sound grain in milliseconds; amplitude: amplitude of the wave inside the grain with a value from 0 to 1; position X: position of the grain in stereophonic with values from -1 to 1;1 position Y: this parameter does not affect sound synthesis, but when Granular Streamer is linked to Granular Drawer, this parameter is the vertical position in which the grain will be plotted on the screen;1 density: this parameter does not affect sound synthesis when it is controlled from a text file
It indicates the density of grains and it will be by-passed by Granular Streamer;1 offset: if the grain stream was specified to use a wavetable instead of a fixed wave type like sine, square, etc., this parameter indicates the position to start reading the waveform in a table with values between 0 and 1, see details below in the topic Granulation of Sound;1 offadd: this parameter does not affect sound synthesis when it is controlled from a text file, but it specifies an automatic shifting of the offset
Summary
Granular Synthesis was discovered by the Nobel Prize winner physicist Dennis Gabor inspired by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle of the Quantum Mechanics. A time (or frequency) envelope must be provided to all grains This very “informal” way to define sound grains is just the Roads one when he considers Granular Synthesis “A grain of sound is a brief microacoustic event, with a duration near the threshold of human auditory perception, typically between one thousandth of a second and one tenth of a second (from 1 to 100 ms). A mathematical approach allows this control, the spectral wealth can be compromised since it’s very difficult to sculpt a wished sound wave as, for example those ones of musical instruments Between these two extreme approaches there are plenty of room for many possible hybrids methods to generate, as Roads named them, microsounds. We present here a mathematical approach to generate sound streams with a large number of grains based on parameters as frequency and duration which in our model are time dependent.
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