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Granular Synthesis
How It Works & Ways To Use It
Hardware > Synthesizer Software > Synthesizer
By Simon Price Published December 2005

Granular synthesis is the core technology behind the latest time-stretching

and pitch-shifting algorithms, but it can also be used to generate
extraordinary evolving soundscapes. We explain how the process works and
show you how to get the best from the software that uses it.

The majority of software instruments use variations on the synthesis

In this article...
method known as subtractive synthesis. This is the sound generation
method where you start with simple (yet harmonically rich) waveforms Granular Synthesis 101
such as triangle, square, and sawtooth waves, then use volume Warping Time & Pitch With Granular Synthesis
Granular Samplers & Synths
envelopes, filters, filter envelopes, and LFOs (Low Frequency Oscillators)
Drums & Transients
to sculpt the starting sound into something more musical. The reasons
Sound-Design Tools
why subtractive synthesis is so dominant are both historical and
Advanced Possibilities
practical. The historical reason is that most of the synthesizers that
shaped the development of electronic music production (the classic
analogue Moogs, ARPs, Korgs, and so on) used this scheme. Hence

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subtractive software synthesizers are commonly known as 'virtual

analogue' instruments. These instruments are what musicians are
accustomed to using, and they make characteristic sounds that have
become part of the common musical sound repertoire. On a practical
level, these synths are relatively easy to learn, and can be modelled in
software without using a huge amount of processing power. It is
probably for this last reason that subtractive synths, and straightforward sample-playback
instruments, have taken such a lead in desktop music. However, as computers have become
much faster, digital signal processing techniques that were once the preserve of academic labs
and telephone companies are finding a strong foothold in music software.

The technique known rather grandly as granular synthesis is an extremely powerful audio
manipulation system that makes it possible to adjust the speed, pitch, and formant
characteristics of audio samples independently of one another, and all in real time if your
computer is fast enough. However, granular synthesis principles can also create new and often
spectacular shifting sounds using very basic means.

Acid, now at version 5 and under the care of Sony, was the first to make real-time pitch and
time adjustment well known, and nowadays most people into computer music will have played
with Ableton's tempo-warping Live software, not to mention Apple's Garage Band. Celemony's
Melodyne is now arguably the purest and most sophisticated package for editing audio using
granular synthesis, managing to carve out a niche alongside the mighty Auto-Tune.

Native Instruments Reaktor has always had this technology right at its heart, but focuses on the
creative sound-design possibilities of the granular approach. NI's work in this area has led to
the powerful time, pitch, and timbre manipulation in their Kontakt, Intakt, and Absynth packages,
finally blurring the line between samplers and synthesizers. Propellerhead's Reason package
also contains a granular synth Malström, and even Fruity Loops Studio has the Granulizer.

The aim of this article is to explain the basics of

how granular synthesis works (for those with
an interest in these things), and also to describe
some examples of it in action. For those who
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for time/pitch manipulation or sound
generation — understanding how it works
should shed some light on how to approach

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some of the more esoteric parameters like

Grain Size or Smoothing.
The top waveform shows a very short clip of a vocal
recording, while the one below it has been
Granular Synthesis 101 time-stretched without a drop in pitch, repeating the
wave pattern to achieve the extra length. The third
Have you ever wondered how some audio- track shows the audio transposed up seven
semitones — increasing the pitch squashes the
editing programs and plug-ins can manipulate
waveform, so it has again been looped to preserve
the tempo and pitch of audio independently? the clip's length.
Normally, of course, the laws of physics tie
these two parameters together: slow audio down and the pitch drops proportionally. The
screenshot on the facing page shows some very close-up views of audio waveforms in Pro
Tools. The top track is a very short section of a female vocal recording. The point we're looking
at is part of the 'ooo' sound in the word 'you'. The second track has the same audio clip that's
been slowed down dramatically using Pro Tools ' built in Time Stretch plug-in. Notice how the
On the same subject
waveform itself has not been stretched — this would cause a drop in pitch, because pitch is
inversely proportional to wavelength. Instead, the Time Stretch algorithm has detected a ADDAC Marble Physics
November 2016
repeating wave pattern, and simply looped it to achieve the extra length. The third track shows
Korg MicroKorg S
the original clip transposed up seven semitones by the Pitch Shift plug-in. The original
October 2016
waveform has been squashed horizontally (in time) to achieve an increase in pitch, so again the Vermona TwinCussion
algorithm has had to loop the waveform, this time in order to preserve the length. October 2016
Make Noise 0-Coast
This scheme works because, although most sounds sound to our ears like they change and October 2016
develop quickly, when you zoom in and look at even the most complex waveforms (like speech) Twisted Electrons Acid8 MkII
you see that, in fact, many parts of harmonic and vocal sounds consist of steady periods of a October 2016
repeating waveform, with short transitions in between. A little experiment makes this clearer:
try saying your name really slowly and listen to the sound you make. For me that goes Latest Videos
something like, 'sss-aah-eee-mmm-nnn'. Your voice moves from one consistent steady sound
to another, except for when you get to hard consonants like 'k' or 't' (see the 'Drums &
Transients' box for more on this). At the waveform level, steady sounds appear as many cycles
of the same small wave shape. So, if I recorded myself saying my name at normal speed into
Pro Tools, I could zoom in and painstakingly loop the waveforms during each section of the
word (crossfading the edit points), and end up with something that sounded similar to me
saying the word slowly, but at the same pitch. Conversely, I could speed myself up by deleting
some of the cycles from each portion of the word. This is the basis of how time-stretching
works.

Now, say that I took a few Slate VMS: Classic Mic Shoot-Out

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cycles of waveform from Uploaded 2 weeks 4 days ago

each sound in my name,
and mapped them as
loops onto keys in a
sampler. One key would
give a steady 'sssssss',
another a steady
'ahhhhh', and so on. Now
if I pressed each key in
rapid succession it would
(roughly) re-synthesize the original recording using these 'grains' of sound. If I played the
sequence of keys faster, the word would be reconstructed faster, but the pitch would stay the Ocean Way Audio HR3.5 - AES 2016
same. Also, I could push the pitch-bend wheel to pitch up the samples, but still play the key Uploaded 1 month 1 day ago

sequence at any speed I liked. What's more, I could play back the sequence in any order, and
even make the sounds overlap by holding down more than one key at a time, generating an
entirely new and more complicated sound. This is how granular synthesis works.

Granular synthesis is a catch-all term for a number of different audio systems that work by
using tiny snippets of sound that can be manipulated individually and are recombined to
generate the final output. The majority of granular systems available use audio files/samples
as their raw material. Samples are sliced up (behind the scenes) into a series of tiny sections,
each usually between one 100th and one 10th of a second in duration. Each slice is known as a
'grain', and a sequence of grains is called a 'graintable'. If the software made up a graintable
which played back all the grains extracted from a given sample in their original sequence and Ocean Way Audio RM1-B - AES 2016
at the original speed, then you'd hear the original sample reproduced. If the software played Uploaded 1 month 1 day ago
the sequence back more slowly, gaps would appear between the slices, so the current slice in
the graintable is usually looped. Played back more quickly, each grain overlaps with the next
one, or some grains get skipped depending on how the software works. To avoid clicks and
glitches, each grain is faded in and out with a volume envelope, a process known as
'smoothing'.

Warping Time & Pitch With Granular Synthesis

Native Instruments' Intakt is a loop playback and
manipulation tool with three 'audio engines'. As
well as basic sample playback and a beat-slicing

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mode (handling each rhythmic event in a loop as a

separate sample), Intakt has a granular Time
Propellerhead Reason's Malström lets you select
Machine mode. To the left of the waveform different preset samples as your initial
display you get two knobs, both marked Tempo. graintable, and you can set the starting position
The smaller one on the right gives you manual for playback using the Index slider. The speed at
which Malström plays the graintable is
control over the speed of playback of the sample,
determined by the Motion knob.
and is great for experimenting with how granular
time-stretching works and sounds. While playing the sample, if you turn this knob anticlockwise
the playback gradually slows down, but maintaining the original pitch. If you go to extremes,
you should be able to hear what is happening — at about five percent of the original speed you
can clearly hear the playback graintable stepping from one grain to the next, each grain being
looped until the next one takes over.

To the right of the waveform are some controls that show up in different guises in most
granular synthesis-based software. The first is the Grain Size control, which is a pop-up list of
options in Intakt. Grain Size is the length of each slice of sound, determining how finely the
original sample is chopped up. In Intakt, the list gives suggestions for which grain size to use to
obtain the most transparent results for different types of material. There are similar
parameters in the Warp section of Ableton's Live software — again, rather than a continuous
Grain Size control, a list of options is provided: Beats, Tones, and Textures.

Granular Samplers & Synths

Tools such as Intakt, Melodyne, and Live use granular synthesis to edit and match the tempos,
timings, and keys of recorded audio clips. A whole other breed of products uses granulated
samples as the source sounds for instruments. The likes of Absynth, Malström, and Kontakt all
use the familiar synth/sampler instrument structure, with sound generators being modulated
and filtered. The difference is that they can all swap the usual sound-generation stage of
oscillators or samples for granular synthesis engines. A detailed analysis of how this works in
Malström can be found in the Reason Notes column in SOS August 2005. The same principle
applies to other current granular synths. When used in granular mode, each sound source in
the instrument is a granulated sample: a graintable. Some instruments allow the user to load
their own sample (for example Reaktor, Kontakt, and Absynth), while others provide preset
waveforms (Malström).

Looking at Reason Malström, in the Oscillator A

section (the sound-generating module of the

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synth), there is a small pop-up window which

selects the sample (graintable) that is to be
used as the starting point. In the screenshot,
I've chosen Ambient Chord 2. The other
parameters on the Oscillator A module should
now begin to make sense. The Index slider sets
the starting position for playback in the
graintable, and the entire sample is mapped
out along this slider. The Motion control simply
sets the speed at which Malström sweeps
through the graintable, and the main pitch
settings transpose the sample — speed and Because you can load any sample into Native
Instruments Kontakt for granular processing, manual
pitch changes are, of course, independent.
Grain Size and Smoothing controls are provided so
Finally, the Shift knob provides independent that you can optimise the processing to different
control over the formant characteristics of the sounds.
sound.

With all these controls at their zero positions, Malström behaves like an ordinary sampler, with
the significant advantage that playing up and down the keyboard does not speed up and slow
down the sample: it's like having a multisample map, but without having to have more than
one sample. Beyond this, there is a huge amount of flexibility, and you can quickly move away
from the starting point to make radically different sounds. All the controls can be modulated
with Malström 's LFOs, and it's the sweeping of the parameters that gives granular synthesizers
their characteristically rich and 'alive' sound. Something you can do with Malström is modulate
the Index control, or sample position. As we'll see when we look at Reaktor, this is one of the
most valuable tools for creating deep granular sounds and atmospheres. Playing around with
the graintable position and playback characteristics means that one sample can provide the
material to generate a huge variety of unexpected results.

Kontakt cannot modulate the sample position

(although you can create loop points), but it
does give control over some other parameters
that are preset in Malström 's graintables.
Specifically, it features controls for Grain Size
and Smoothing. In Malström, with it's preloaded
The Density setting in Native Instruments Absynth
list of graintables, the grain size has been lets each grain overlay those following it, which often
preset to provide the most transparent creates phasey metallic sounds.

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response. Because Kontakt can load any audio file as its starting point, the user must set the
grain size. This means that you can forget about transparency if you wish, and go for a more
grungy sound. You can also modulate the grain size via an LFO or envelope. The Smoothing
parameter, to recap, is the volume envelope applied to each individual grain, so it's effectively a
fade-in/out control. Again, you can set this to produce a nice even response, or go for a special
effect.

The last synth I want to look at is Absynth, because it features yet another parameter, leading us
towards the full implementation of granular synthesis found in Reaktor. Most of the parameters
in Absynth 2 should now be familiar, but a Density setting has also been added. This sets the
number of grains that can be playing back at once, which in Absynth 's case can be between one
and eight. All the examples we've looked at before can be likened to having a single 'play head'
sweeping around the graintable in a mostly linear fashion. However, granular synthesis gets
really interesting as a sound-design tool when you start firing off multiple grains
simultaneously, and not necessarily in sequential order. Absynth doesn't go quite this far: its
Density control just provides for varying grain overlap, which means that you can have several
neighbouring grains firing at once as the graintable is played. This smooths out and thickens
the sound, but inevitably adds a metallic or phasey characteristic, as you are overlapping a
series of similar-sounding grains with a tiny delay between them.

Drums & Transients

Percussive sounds and drum loops pose some fairly major challenges to granular
synthesis engines, especially when you're wanting to time-stretch samples to slow them
down. Granular time-stretching relies on the fact that a lot of what we hear consists of
repeated cycles of small waveforms, but transients (like drum hits and hard consonants
in vocals/speech) are quite different. These parts of a sound are typically short,
complicated, rapidly changing waveforms. When a sample is split into grains, the
transients may fall within a whole grain, or split across several, depending on the grain
size used. Neither of these situations is welcome, because when the graintable is played
back slowly grains are moved apart and looped. You will probably have heard the
problem this causes: drums that have been slowed down by time-stretching start to
sound flammy. The same goes for vocals, with the hard consonants st-t-t-uutt-t-t-ering.

Systems that don't have any way of compensating for this problem
have a very limited range within which a sample can be slowed
down. If you load a drum loop into Intakt, you can slow it down and

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listen for when the problem starts causing noticeable degradation The Transient Size
(TRS) control and
of the sound. Short, sharp sections of the waveform, such as
Transient Copy (TRC)
rim-shots, present a particularly tough test, especially if the grain switch are provided to
size is set manually without any intelligent analysis. My ears can help avoid the
detect a drum loop's rim-shot starting to 'break up' into two peaks flamming of
percussive sounds
at just two to three percent slower than original speed, and
when you're slowing
ordinary snare drums start to flam at about four to five percent down sampled loops
down. using Intakt's Time
Machine mode.
There are a number of ways in which the designers of a granular
synthesis or time-stretching system can improve on this situation, two of which are
present in Intakt. The first is to have the software analyse the sample and choose variable
grain sizes. In other words, instead of relying on a user-defined grain size, the software
tries to chop up each part of the sample in the most efficient way. The software makes
distinctions between areas that change rapidly, and those that are more steady tones.
This at least ensures that transients are not split across more than one grain. In Intakt
this option is the default, with the user being able to change to a fixed Grain Size if
desired.

The second way that transient handling can be improved is to use a transient detection
system to ensure that the transients are preserved in their original state, at whatever
playback speed (as they would in real life drumming or vocal performances). This means
that not only must they be contained within one chunk (one grain), but that they should
only be played back once instead of being looped at slower speeds. Intakt and Kontakt do
something like this when you engage the TRC (Transient Copy) button. The software
detects peaks and sudden changes, and interprets these as transients. A second control,
TRS (Transient Size) is set manually and determines a length for these sections. During
playback, the original transient sections are overlaid on the loop, with their position
staying correct relative to the rest of the sample.

Ableton Live has similar functionality, although it doesn't use transient detection.
Time-stretching and granular settings are chosen from the sample editor window's Warp
pane, and setting the audio type here to Beats tells the software to try to preserve
transients. Instead of detecting these, Live uses time divisions set by the user in the
Transients field, and has to assume that the drum hits land close to these. Anyone
familiar with beat-slicing software, such as Propellerhead Recycle, may have spotted that
this system is a best-of-both-worlds mix of techniques, preserving the original hits (as

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with beat slicing) but filling the gaps with time-stretched material. Another problem
shared with beat slicing is that decays and reverb tails are difficult to keep sounding
natural. Where available, a mixture of small grain size and large transient 'windows' often
works best with drums. Without transient compensation, larger grain sizes will probably
be better.

Sound-Design Tools
Despite all the sampling and synthesis flexibility afforded by the applications we've looked at so
far, when most people think about granular synthesis they probably think of the rich shifting
soundscapes generated by certain Reaktor patches. It's perfectly possible to build synths in
Reaktor similar to those we've already looked at. For example, Triptonizer is not a million miles
away from Malström, except that it uses envelopes to control the movement of sample position,
formant, and so forth. However, as with the synths we've covered, this kind of instrument
generally sweeps fairly uniformly through a graintable. For the more weird and wonderful
sounds, we want to be layering up clusters of grains, introducing randomness, and getting
away from thinking about the samples as a whole. The result is a composite sound known as a
'graincloud'. Reaktor has a straightforward sample synth module, and a Pitch Former (which is
similar but moulds the results into a definite pitched sound), but it also has a module called
Grain Cloud. If you don't have Reaktor, you can download the demo version and check out the
factory instruments Grainstates and Travelizer to get an instant idea of what this module can
do.

Most of Travelizer's front-panel options should

now make sense. The large X-Y controller sets
the sample position and the grain size. The
waveform display has two vertical lines that
indicate the current playback position and the
grain size (Length). The panels to the left allow
modulation of the pitch and graintable
position, and there's a familiar Smoothing
control. So what sets this apart from, say, Native Instruments Reaktor offers extremely
Malström or Kontakt? Firstly, the Grain Cloud powerful granular synthesis facilities, as showcased
module at the heart of this instrument has a in its Travelizer instrument.
parameter called Distance which sets the rate
at which grains are triggered. This means that, as the current playback position moves around

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the graintable, you can fire off as many or as few grains as you want. The Grain Cloud module
can overlap up to 1000 grains at once, so the output signal is the composite of many tiny
portions of the sampled waveform.

The final ingredient is the inclusion of Jitter

inputs on Grain Cloud. These allow you to add
varying degrees of random 'jumpiness' to
several of the main parameters, namely Pitch,
Position, Length, Distance, and Pan. Now, begin
to imagine how things come to life when
combining all these things: grains of sound are
fired off from across the original sample, some
are clustered in small recognisable sequences,
while others are thrown in at random. The
length of the grains and rate at which they
appear and disappear is chaotic, and they Here you can see the internal construction of the
smear out across the stereo field, overlap, and Travelizer instrument, centred around Reaktor's
become a boiling swarm. A soundscape builds Grain Cloud module. The window on the left selects
samples from your computer's hard drive for
up that's like nothing you've heard before, yet
granular processing. The left-hand side of the Grain
the chaos and movement tricks your brain into Cloud module has a long list of nodes, with cables
thinking it might somehow be natural and not a attached from various controllers and other
synth. From this point you can mould and modules. This represents all the parameters that can
be controlled and modulated, and is the key to the
constrain the sound with all the familiar tools —
extraordinary variety of sounds the unit can
filters, envelopes, and effects — to create a generate.
playable musical instrument, or just enjoy it for
what it is.

Advanced Possibilities
Most of what we've looked at is the brand of granular synthesis that uses a chopped-up audio
sample as the source of sound grains. This is because the large majority of music products
available that employ granular synthesis work this way. However, this is only a partial view of
what can be done. For a start, it's perfectly possible for software to use a live audio input
instead of an audio file. Computers are fast enough to chop a signal into grains on the fly, then
synthesize and mess with them, all in real time. This is how granular synthesis-based effects,
such as Spektral Delay, KTGranulator, and many Pluggo plug-ins, work. Most real-time pitch-

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shifters and vocal processors are likely also to be taking a granular approach.

Mentioning Spektral Delay raises the topic of other methods of granular synthesis that have
rarely seen the light of day. Everything we've looked at so far uses grains based in the time
domain, but it's also possible to split up sounds by frequency and then resynthesize them, as
Spektral Delay does. The next logical step will be for synths to do away with sampled or digitised
audio sources altogether, and synthesise their own grains from scratch. This would be like a
two-stage synthesis process, with the first stage generating an array of grains and envelopes,
each probably one cycle in length (and known as a 'wavelet'), which would then be synthesized
by the second stage. Something close to this could probably be built in Reaktor, using the Grain
Delay module, so if you get a few months off, there's a challenge!

Granular synthesis is likely to find its way into many more instruments in the future, and is
perfect for those days when you're bored of the same old array of re-created analogue
sounds. Not only do granular synths create dynamic, organic sounds, they have an untamed
quality and often produce unexpected treats that turn into song ideas. In fact, if you produce
ambient or film music, a decent granular synth can do half your job for you! 

Published December 2005

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