with Jürgen Simpson 3pm CSG-01 Wednesday October 7th
Imagine taking a sound and shattering it into thousands of tiny fragments. Now, imagine reassembling these grains like sonic LEGO bricks, scattering them in time and layering them into dense clouds, or stretching them out to create strange textures impossible to achieve with traditional recording or synthesis.
This is granular synthesis a method of sound design that operates on the microsound time scale, treating sound not as a continuous wave, but as a stream of discrete particles. By manipulating size, density, pitch, and spatial position of these grains, you can separate a sound's pitch from its time. You can slow a recording to a crawl without dropping its pitch, freeze a single moment in sound forever, or transform a spoken word into an evolving, shimmering ambient pad.
This workshop explores the conceptual origins of this technique, the core parameters that govern it, listen to some landmark works, and seeing it in action using software and hardware tools.
