GRANULAR SYNTHESIS

1946

Denis Gabor — "Theory of Communication"

Proposed acoustic quanta, applying Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to audio. Established that pitch and time precision are mutually exclusive at small scales — the theoretical foundation of all granular synthesis.

1959

Iannis Xenakis — "Analogique A+B"

First granular synthesis composition, realized by hand-splicing magnetic tape into tiny fragments and reassembling them according to stochastic probability scores. An impossible human labor that took months to complete.

1974

Gottfried Michael Koenig — "Project 1"

Computer-aided stochastic composition at the Institute of Sonology, Utrecht. Early formalization of algorithmic processes for granular-adjacent sound design, helping bridge Xenakis's theory and digital practice.

1985

Barry Truax — "Riverrun"

First real-time granular synthesis on a computer (DMX-1000 signal processor). The piece transforms water sounds into vast river textures using granular time-stretching — a landmark in electroacoustic music.

1988

Curtis Roads — Formalization

Roads formalizes granular synthesis terminology in his writings, later consolidated in The Computer Music Tutorial (1996) and Microsound (2001). His taxonomy — synchronous, asynchronous, pitch-synchronous — defines the field.

1995

Autechre — "Garbage" (Anvil Vapre EP)

Granular rhythm as electronic music aesthetic. Autechre begin applying granular processing to percussion, creating rhythmic grain clouds that dissolve the boundary between beat and texture — a defining IDM move.

2002

William Basinski — "Disintegration Loops"

Accidental granular dissolution: playing deteriorating 1980s tape loops while recording the process of their physical destruction. The magnetic oxide flaking from the tape became the instrument. Released on September 13, 2001.

2010

Ableton Live 8 — Mainstream DAW

Granular capabilities reach mainstream DAW users via third-party instruments and later native tools. Producers in pop, electronic, and film scoring gain access to granular time-stretching in their everyday workflow.

2018

Mutable Instruments Clouds

Granular synthesis as Eurorack hardware module — discontinued in 2017 due to ubiquity, but remains the most-cloned module in the modular synthesis world. Brought real-time granular manipulation to hardware performance contexts.

Iannis Xenakis

1922–2001 // FORMALIZED MUSIC

Stochastic composition pioneer. Applied Markov chains, Poisson distributions, and Brownian motion to determine every parameter of a composition. His Analogique A+B (1959) was the first granular piece, assembled by hand from tape fragments.

Curtis Roads

b. 1951 // THE COMPUTER MUSIC TUTORIAL

Coined the term microsound. Defined granular synthesis as a formal discipline in his landmark 2001 book. His own compositions — Half-Life, Sculptor — use granular clouds as primary compositional material.

Barry Truax

b. 1947 // RIVERRUN (1985)

Created the first real-time granular synthesis piece on computer. Pioneered granular time-stretching and acoustic ecology approaches, using environmental sounds as source material for electroacoustic works.

William Basinski

b. 1958 // DISINTEGRATION LOOPS

Accidental granular artist. Playing deteriorating tape loops while recording their dissolution — the magnetic oxide flakes from the tape as it runs, each pass removing a little more. Released September 13, 2001, as the World Trade Center burned.

Tim Hecker

b. 1974 // RAVEDEATH 1972

Granular guitar processing creates dense spectral shimmer fields. Albums like Ravedeath 1972 (2011) and Harmony in Ultraviolet (2006) apply granular techniques to organ and guitar, transforming tonal sources into immersive fog.

Fennesz

b. 1962 // ENDLESS SUMMER (2001)

Classical guitar recordings granularized into shimmering, droning ambient textures. Endless Summer processes the Beach Boys' harmonic language through laptop granular tools, creating something at once nostalgic and completely alien.

Kim Cascone

b. 1955 // POST-DIGITAL AESTHETICS

Granular and glitch synthesis as critique of digital perfection. Coined the term post-digital in his influential 2000 essay. Former director of multimedia at Lucasfilm; now creates work from the sonic artifacts of computational failure.

Autechre

EST. 1987 // CONFIELD / UNTILTED

Granular rhythm programming using Max/MSP. Grain clouds as percussion texture throughout Confield (2001) and Untilted (2005). Their approach treats rhythm as a probability space rather than a grid — grains activate according to conditional logic.

Grain

A micro-segment of audio, typically 1–100ms. The fundamental unit of granular synthesis — a quantum of sound.

Grain Cloud

The aggregate texture produced by many overlapping grains. The cloud is the composition; no single grain is audible in isolation.

Grain Size

Duration of each grain in milliseconds. Determines whether the source is recognizable — small grains produce texture, large grains preserve identity.

Grain Density

Number of grains triggered per second. High density produces continuous texture; low density creates sparse, isolated sonic events.

Scatter

Randomization of grain position within the source file. High scatter reads from random points; low scatter reads linearly, preserving the original sequence.

Pitch Randomization

Random transposition of individual grains, measured in semitones. Spreads the cloud vertically — from unison to wide chromatic smear.

Position

The read-head location within the source file, from 0.0 (start) to 1.0 (end). Can be automated to create granular scrubbing through a recording.

Microsound

Curtis Roads's term for sound at the sub-note time scale (1ms–500ms). The domain in which individual grains exist and human pitch/rhythm perception breaks down.

Stochastic

Random processes governed by probability distributions. Xenakis's key contribution: replacing compositional decisions with statistical functions that generate controlled randomness.

Probability Distribution

A mathematical function describing the likelihood of each possible value. Gaussian (bell curve), uniform, and exponential distributions all produce different grain cloud characters.

Time-Stretching

Changing the duration of audio without affecting pitch. Granular time-stretch achieves this by repeating or omitting grains — the most artifact-free method at extreme ratios.

Phase Vocoder

An FFT-based time-stretch method that maintains phase coherence between frequency bins. Smoother than granular but prone to characteristic "phasiness" on transient-rich sources.

Acoustic Quanta

Gabor's 1946 term for the elementary units of acoustic information, analogous to photons in light. Each quantum has a location in time and frequency — but not both with arbitrary precision.

Gabor Atom

A Gaussian-windowed sinusoid — the mathematically optimal grain shape for representing sound. Minimizes the time-frequency uncertainty product as defined by the Heisenberg limit.

Dissolution

The gradual breakdown of granular parameters — increasing scatter, randomizing size, reducing density — until the source is unrecognizable. Basinski's tapes dissolved literally; granular synthesis can simulate this entropy.

Freeze Effect

Setting position scatter to maximum and position automation to zero, creating a static cloud from a single moment in the source audio. A sonic photograph — an instant held forever in granular suspension.

Granulation

The process of breaking audio into grains. All granular synthesis begins with granulation of a source — live input, recorded sample, or synthesized waveform.

Texture

In granular synthesis, texture refers to a sonic mass without clear pitch or rhythmic identity — the emergent quality of thousands of micro-events heard as a single homogeneous sound.

Murmuration

The visual analog of granular synthesis: a flock of starlings moving as a unified cloud. Each bird follows simple rules; the group produces complex, unpredictable, beautiful patterns.

Async. Granular

Asynchronous granular synthesis: grains are triggered at random intervals within a density range, rather than at fixed periodic intervals. Produces more organic, less mechanical cloud textures.

GRANULAR SYNTHESIS

GRAIN CLOUD

PARAMETER MAP

DISSOLUTION

STOCHASTIC ENGINE

70 YEARS OF GRAIN

WHO WORKED WITH THE GRAIN

20 TERMS