This is a short demonstration of Granita, a minimalist granular synthesis patch for Pd (Pure Data) mainly for working on pre-existing recordings.

It is in development, but fully functional. Most of the workings of the patch were inspired by reading Microsound by Curtis Roads.

via Lorenzo Sutton

Shards, by Gattobus,is a lie granular synthesis experiment.

Patch details below.

Gattobus explains the setup:

Stereo headphones recommended.

The audio is sampled live from Nord Modular G2 audio inputs and reduced to bits, stretched, and compressed by a patch of my creation.
The button that I press on the modular is for capturing audio fragments.
The captured sound sources are the Nord Modular itself, Elektron Monomachine and the Elektron Machinedrum.
Nothing is pre-recorded, everything is sequenced LIVE and processed in real-time time.

—

Per un ascolto migliore è consigliato usare delle cuffie.

L’audio viene campionato in tempo reale dagli ingressi audio del Nord Modular G2 e spezzettato, stretchato e compresso da una patch di mia creazione.
Il bottone che mi vedete premere sul Modular serve per catturare frammenti di audio.
Le sorgenti sonore catturate sono lo stesso Modular, l’Elektron Monomachine e l’Elektron Machinedrum.
Nulla è stato pre-registrato, ogni cosa è sequencerizzata dal vivo e processata in tempo reale.

Loomer Shift is a real-time diatonic granular pitch shifting and delay effect for Mac & Windows.

Shift has three independent true stereo delay lines with discrete time, feedback, pan, and volume controls. Each delay line can be set in one of three pitch shifting configurations (Chromatic, Recursive, or Diatonic) and transposed by as much as an octave up or down using both coarse semitone and finely grained cent controls.

Shift is available for Mac OS X v 10.4 and above, Windows XP and above, and Linux, in Audio Unit, VST plugin, RTAS for Pro Tools 7 and above, and Standalone application formats. Shift retails for £35.00.

In Diatonic mode the accurate and responsive pitch tracker follows any monophonic audio source and tunes the pitch of the delay line harmonies to remain in key and in scale.

Shift’s echoes can either be synced to the host tempo (expressing delay times as musical subdivisions of a beat, with each echo exactly in time with the host) or in free-time mode (allowing fine tuning of the delay times, up to 2 seconds.)

Each delay line can be modulated using the straightforward Pitch and Time modulation controls, capable of generating a wide range of sounds from subtle detuning to extreme audio mangling.

True independent stereo processing means that left and right channel separation is preserved. Shift is also capable or running in mono, or even mono to stereo.

With optimized audio algorithms that won’t overload your processor, rock-solid stability, and easy integration with any MIDI hardware controller, Shift is ideal for live work. With a simple and intuitive interface, flexible Bank and Program management, and total parameter automation, Shift fits right into your studio environment.

An evaluation is available for free download, with the following limitations:

* User created Program and Bank configurations can be saved, but not loaded.
* Output will be periodically interrupted, approximately every minute, by a short moment of silence.
* Audio output will stop after 30 minutes of continuous use. The only way to continue using Shift is to restart the application.

Purchasing a licence will remove these evaluation limitations.

It’s about to get heavier, as the current version gets new features and morphs into Curtis Heavy:

Click here to view the embedded video.

With Curtis Heavy, you can load your own wav files. They’ve also added a grain range mode.

See below for another video demo!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Multimedia artist Marcus Fischer captured some of his experiments manipulating thumb piano with Curtis (App Store link), the granular synth app for the iPhone that’ll set you back 1 American dollar:

the strange agency made this great little granular synthesis iphone application called curtis.  it’s named for composer, author, granular synth advocate curtis roads. this is just a quick little thing i recorded using a captured bit of sound from a thumb piano.  pretty fun little application to play with.

Curtis is a very limited (or focused, depending on your viewpoint) application. But it’s amazing that for $1, you can turn your iPhone into a very useful tool for exploring the world of granular synthesis.

via Peter Kirn

This is a demo of Curtis (App Store link), a $1 granular synthesizer application for the iPhone.

Description:

Granular synthesis works by combining many tiny grains of sound from an existing recording, generally creating new sounds with the textural properties of the recording. Granular synthesis allows you to regenerate the recording, playing it forward or backward at any speed, to skip around the recording playing tiny slices of it at random, or to loop a small portion with a varying loop size.

1] Touch the screen with two fingers and rotate a quarter circle to activate recording mode.

2] Use your phone’s microphone to record any sound. Try your voice, music from the radio, an instrument, your dog, anything!

3] Touch the screen with two fingers again to stop recording.

4] Touch or drag one finger anywhere on the screen to control grain synthesis. The long axis of the phone controls your read position; use this to select the portion of the recording you wish to read from. The short axis of the phone controls the grain size; use this to sample tiny slices or bigger chunks.

5] Double tap to disable or enable position slew. With slew enabled, the read position slowly moves to where you tapped. With slew disabled, you can jump directly to new positions in the recording.

More info at TheStrangeAgency site.

If you’ve used Curtis, leave a comment with your thoughts!

Curtis Roads is a composer, author and computer programmer specializing in granular and pulsar synthesis.

He co-founded the International Computer Music Association in 1980 and edited the Computer Music Journal for over 23 years. He has created software including PulsarGenerator and the Creatovox, both with Alberto de Campo.

In this series of interviews, Roads talks about granular synthesis, microsound and his ideas on electronic music. And then he takes apart his Hammond organ.

Check out these videos and leave a comment with your thoughts!

Getting Granular

Click here to view the embedded video.

Microsound encompasses any sound thats so short it couldnt fit on the normal musical time scale. In terms of measurement, youre talking anywhere from 10 milliseconds to 1/10 of a second.

Building Compositions With Granular Synthesis

Click here to view the embedded video.

Curtis Roads shows you his garden and explains its connection to his music, and then he takes apart a Hammond organ.

This bizarre video, Granular Synthesis – Modell 5 (STRP 4-4-2009), explores granular synthesis applied to video.

via Trashware:

Granular Synthesis – Modell 5 shown at the STRP festival 4-4-2009 (fragment)Eindhoven, NetherlandsMODELL 5 is an installation that manipulates the face of Japanese performer Akemi Takeya. The result is a cyborg hybrid, a cross between human and machine. Viewers follow the lives of the four clones on giant screens spanning 18 x 6 metres.http://www.strp.nl/

Until recently, a downside to granular synthesis was the fact that there was no good way to build meaningful granular models of sound. This is not the case with other synthesis techniques. For example, one can get an additive synthesis model for a given sound sample by deriving it’s Fourier Transform. The additive synthesis model in this case meaningfully represents the original sound.

New algorithms have emerged in the last few years which build just such a model for granular synthesis. One popular algorithm, called Matching Pursuit, iteratively matches a given signal with grains from a pre-determined dictionary (or set of parameter definitions) of grains. When the algorithm is finished, we are left with a granular model of the original signal which give us totally unique methods of sonic transformations. However, these algorithms are quite slow (much slower than real-time) and there are a number of poorly understood artifacts that need more study. It should be noted that while the analysis is slow, resynthesis is possible in real-time.

In addition to researching novel sound-design and musical applications for this technique, as well as developing software tools to aid in this endeavor, our research is also focused on improving the algorithms. Because of destructive interference between grains in our model, it usually contains more energy than is present in the signal we actually hear. Because we can’t hear it, but the energy is there, we call it Dark Energy. Most research in this field is focused on eliminating Dark Energy. We are interested in finding ways we might be able to use it to improve the algorithm or to inform our granular model transformations.

Here’s an example, with the original piano solo recording and the manipulated piece:

via disquiet

It consists of three audio plug-ins for RTAS, HTDM, MAS, Audio Unit and VST. Improvements over the previous version include additional automation features, support for surround formats and high sample rates.

RiverRun is a Granular Soundscape Synthesizer capable of oozing immense sonic oceans of tiny particals taken from your original audio. It can build rhythmic textures, wide harmonic soundscapes, and it can zoom in on your fragment by stretching it by a factor of up to 200.

PeriScope lets you look at the audio spectrum via the real-time animating spectroscope, or graphic analyzer, and grab faders where you see the audio happening. Phase Correct EQ, with surgical precision, and unprecedented low frequency resolution. Edit modes range from fluent to massively steep.

Deep Phase Nine is a true phaser that offers unparalleled control and visual feedback. Up to 24 notches per channel, beat locked sample and hold, one-shots, a true phaser (Not a flanger !) done the Audio Ease way.

List Price is $299, upgrades cost $99.95. More info, demos and mp3’s can be found at the Audioease site.