First Grain Engine
On the last post I explained about Curtis Roads and my interest to create something using granular synthesis, today I created my first granular engine. I followed some instructions from a YouTube tutorial by Oliver Thurley, a experimental musician and lecturer of computer music in the University of Leeds. The video is inspired directly from Microsound and uses the theory described in the book, this video was extremely helpful to ground my technical knowledge on granular synthesis in Max.
The following picture is the patch where I used what I learnt in the video. Its almost identical to the one in the video, but I did some extra modulation to extend its sound.
So on the left of the patch, the main grain engine is placed. It works by playing a grain of sound (a tiny snippet of audio) of an audio buffer, with a gaussian curve amplitude envelope. I randomised the grain size and position to give it a bit more character, the panning of the grain is also randomised. Below is a recording of me using the grain engine, as you can tell it’s still pretty basic, but its a great point to expand upon.
On conclusion using this video to learn the basics of a grain engine was extremely useful, as he explained everything pretty well and covers all relevant basic knowledge. Now that I know the very basic, I am already to experiment a with some of my custom algorithms/modulation. I still have to learn more of granular synthesisers to meet the expectations I have for this device. I think it’s time to reflect on other granular tools created by other people, and how this tools help them in their own practice. I’ll develop deeper on another post but I attempt to make this device a swiss knife, that helps me solve sound design problems in various mediums. These mediums include, music composition, sound design for video games and films. To have this flexibility I have to explore the shapes of sounds and grant this device the ability to transition swiftly across these shapes. By shapes I meant the time aspect of sounds and volume, so amplitude envelopes. I will attempt to make this device shift from a percussion sound to a drone with a single parameter/slider.