I have been very interested in granular synthesis lately, so I thought I would share my findings. Because of my crazy obsession with noises, I have been using some of the tools below. Soon, I hope to develop something similar to SoundGrain, Sampletoy, and Granulab. I thought maybe some other noise nerds of the world would be interested in these references, and could let me know about other tools out there.
Applications
SoundGrain (Video Above) | Granulab (Not pretty but amazing sounds) | Atomic Cloud | ChaosSynth | Ambient Grains| Granulator | SampleToy(Awesome iPhone app) | Curtis Heavy
Plug-ins
Alchemy (A very nice VST on my wish list) | Grainbot | +bubbler | KTGranulator | Granola | grANALiser | GrainSkan | Fragmental | GranulOSO | GrainFreeze | GGrain | Organik | ParticleCloud | Dropout | Minerva | Pudding | SideSlip | Stwetch | Muchacho | Grainz | Grapheed | Scope
Resources
Curtis Roads (Book | Software | Video | Music) | BT Article | MAX/MSP & PD Objects | Ableton Grain Delay Video | Reason Malstrom Article | Audiomulch Video | Reaktor User Library Search | Plugins Search at KVR | YouTube Example 1 | YouTube Example 2| Wikipedia | GranularSynthesis.com | Implementing Real-Time Granular Synthesis PDF | STK C++ Class
HasCanvas allows you to create Processing apps in a browser that supports the Canvas tag. (so not IE) That site uses the javascript library from Processing.js which is a port of the Processing.org library. They have a live browser IDE here.
You can find projects at: Open Processing , Processingjs.org , Processing.org , Dave Bollinger , Minim , Creative Applications
I converted my Processing app into a Max for Live MIDI Device. So this does not generate sound, just MIDI notes. You can position notes in the grid from a sin function. Rotate them around to simply create all sorts of patterns. The demos below were created by sending the midi to Live’s Scale Device then into Live’s Collision Device.
FlexibleGrid-0.2.amxd | MaxGridInstrument.adg
Can also be found here: http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device.php?id=78
demo1.mp3 | demo2.mp3 | demo3.mp3 | demo4.mp3
More patches from the ableton forum: ML-185 | Monolake’s Sequencer
