Granular Synthesis is often referred and used for pad sounds, but it actually has a ridiculous number of applications and sound design possibilities. Granular Synthesis appears in a lot of tools in your DAW where you wouldn’t expect it, for example pitch shifting. With this method you are able to pitch shift audio without affecting the timing. The audio is getting sliced into a lot of tiny chunks called grains. It is basically the same method when you slice a drum groove, but at a much smaller scale. These tiny grains can have a duration about 1 ms – 100 ms. Grains can be compared with for example a video played back, because in a video you have all the different frames which you can play back at normal speed, but also speed it up or slow it down. In Granular Synthesis it gets interesting when you don’t play back the grains in the correct order but make it kind of random. You can also detune each grain, pan it in different positions or alter its volume. The possibilities are endless for lots of weird and abstract clouds of sounds.
But: Why aren’t there any clicks and pops?
That’s because each grain gets its own crossfade curve that could be just a linear triangle or some kind of bell like shape. This could really affect the sound that comes out. (Theory, 2019)
This process of a waveform modulated by a short envelope is also called a Grain Generator. The short packets of sounds could not only be played back after each other, but also layered on top to create more complex sounds. (Farnell, 2010)
