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Granular Synthesis • Introduction

• Granular Synthesis 101
How It Works & Ways To Use It • Warping Time & Pitch With Granular Synthesis
• Granular Samplers & Synths
• Synthesizers > Synthesis / Sound Design
• Drums & Transients
By Simon Price Published December 2005 • Sound-Design Tools
• Advanced Possibilities
Granular synthesis is the core technology behind the latest time-stretching
and pitch-shifting algorithms, but it can also be used to generate
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extraordinary evolving soundscapes. We explain how the process works and
show you how to get the best from the software that uses it. • Cubase Padshop 2: Grain Oscillator
• Cubase: Padshop 2's Modulation Matrix
The majority of software instruments use variations on the synthesis • Cubase: Padshop 2’s Modulation Matrix: Audio
method known as subtractive synthesis. This is the sound generation Examples

method where you start with simple (yet harmonically rich) waveforms
such as triangle, square, and sawtooth waves, then use volume SOS Competitions
envelopes, filters, filter envelopes, and LFOs (Low Frequency Oscillators)
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to sculpt the starting sound into something more musical. The reasons
why subtractive synthesis is so dominant are both historical and
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practical. The historical reason is that most of the synthesizers that
shaped the development of electronic music production (the classic
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analogue Moogs, ARPs, Korgs, and so on) used this scheme. Hence
subtractive software synthesizers are commonly known as 'virtual
analogue' instruments. These instruments are what musicians are On the same subject
accustomed to using, and they make characteristic sounds that have • Modular: Going Audio-rate
become part of the common musical sound repertoire. On a practical May 2023
level, these synths are relatively easy to learn, and can be modelled in • Cubase: Stranger Things Synths With Retrologue 2
December 2022
software without using a huge amount of processing power. It is
• Cubase: Stranger Things Synths With Retrologue 2
probably for this last reason that subtractive synths, and straightforward sample-playback
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instruments, have taken such a lead in desktop music. However, as computers have become December 2022
much faster, digital signal processing techniques that were once the preserve of academic labs • Granular Synthesis: A Practical Introduction
and telephone companies are finding a strong foothold in music software. November 2022
• The Constance Demby Mystery
The technique known rather grandly as granular synthesis is an extremely powerful audio October 2022
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
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computer is fast enough. However, granular synthesis principles can also create new and often
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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 Latest SOS Videos
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 AR Rahman & Firdaus Studios: A Scoring Stage For The 21st
Granulizer.
Century
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

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describe some examples of it in action. For

those who use software with granular synthesis
technology under the bonnet — whether it is
for time/pitch manipulation or sound
generation — understanding how it works
should shed some light on how to approach
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 time- Building A Library: Spitfire Audio's ABBEY ROAD
Granular Synthesis 101
stretched without a drop in pitch, repeating the wave
ORCHESTRA | Chapter 1
pattern to achieve the extra length. The third track
shows the audio transposed up seven semitones —
Have you ever wondered how some audio- increasing the pitch squashes the waveform, so it has
editing programs and plug-ins can manipulate again been looped to preserve the clip's length.
the tempo and pitch of audio independently?
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 waveform itself has not been stretched — this would cause
a drop in pitch, because pitch is inversely proportional to wavelength. Instead, the Time Stretch Fraser T Smith | Producing 'SET FIRE TO THE RAIN' by Adele
algorithm has detected a repeating wave pattern, and simply looped it to achieve the extra
length. The third track shows the original clip transposed up seven semitones by the Pitch Shift
plug-in. The original waveform has been squashed horizontally (in time) to achieve an increase
in pitch, so again the algorithm has had to loop the waveform, this time in order to preserve
the length.

This scheme works because, although most sounds sound to our ears like they change and
develop quickly, when you zoom in and look at even the most complex waveforms (like speech)
you see that, in fact, many parts of harmonic and vocal sounds consist of steady periods of a
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
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 cycles of waveform from 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 same. Also, I could push the pitch-bend
wheel to pitch up the samples, but still play the key
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 at

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the original speed, then you'd hear the original sample reproduced. If the software played 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
mode (handling each rhythmic event in a loop as a
separate sample), Intakt has a granular Time
Machine mode. To the left of the waveform display Propellerhead Reason's Malström lets you select
you get two knobs, both marked Tempo. The different preset samples as your initial graintable,
smaller one on the right gives you manual control and you can set the starting position for playback
over the speed of playback of the sample, and is using the Index slider. The speed at which
Malström plays the graintable is determined by
great for experimenting with how granular time- the Motion knob.
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
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
pitch changes are, of course, independent. Instruments Kontakt for granular processing, manual
Finally, the Shift knob provides independent Grain Size and Smoothing controls are provided so
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

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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.
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
listen for when the problem starts causing noticeable degradation The Transient Size
of the sound. Short, sharp sections of the waveform, such as rim- (TRS) control and
shots, present a particularly tough test, especially if the grain size is Transient Copy (TRC)
switch are provided to
set manually without any intelligent analysis. My ears can detect a
help avoid the
drum loop's rim-shot starting to 'break up' into two peaks at just flamming of
two to three percent slower than original speed, and ordinary snare percussive sounds
drums start to flam at about four to five percent down. when you're slowing
down sampled loops
There are a number of ways in which the designers of a granular using Intakt's Time
Machine mode.
synthesis or time-stretching system can improve on this situation,

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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 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
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

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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
Grain Cloud module. The window on the left selects
become a boiling swarm. A soundscape builds
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 modules.
This represents all the parameters that can be
synth. From this point you can mould and
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-
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!

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