Granular Basics - ectoplasma

Granular synthesis slices a sound into tiny fragments — grains — typically 10 to 500 milliseconds each. Each grain has its own mini fade-in and fade-out so the edges don't click. Layer hundreds of them and they blend into something new.

The key trick: pitch and speed become independent. A tape machine locks them together — speed it up and the pitch rises. Granular breaks that. You can freeze a sound in place while shifting its pitch up two octaves, or race through a buffer at triple speed while keeping the pitch unchanged.

Controls

Size — how long each grain lasts.

Tiny (10–30 ms) — grains fuse into a buzzy hum. The grain rate itself becomes a new pitch.
Medium (50–150 ms) — fractured but recognisable. Like hearing through frosted glass.
Large (200–500 ms) — smooth, cloudy. Grains carry the full character of the source.

Overlap — how much each grain fades into the next. Low overlap = rhythmic stuttering. High overlap = smooth continuous pad.

Speed — how fast we scan through the source. At 1× it plays normally. Below 1× it stretches without pitch change. Above 1× it compresses. At nearly zero the sound freezes in place.

Pitch — shifts every grain up or down without changing the speed. ±24 semitones (two octaves each way).

Try this: set Speed to minimum and Pitch to maximum. The source freezes while the pitch rockets up. Now swap: Speed high, Pitch low. It races past but sounds deep. No tape machine can do both.

Sources

All three buffers are generated in the browser — no files loaded.

Tone — 110 Hz with overtones. Good for hearing grain size on pitched material.
Chord — A minor triad. Shows how granular smears harmony into texture.
Noise — filtered white noise. No pitch, so granular creates pure rhythm and texture.

History

Iannis Xenakis imagined clouds of sound particles in the 1960s. Curtis Roads formalised the technique and wrote the book (Microsound, 2001). It stayed academic until CPUs got fast enough for real-time grain generation. Today it is everywhere — film scores, ambient music, vocal effects, and the texture beds under most modern electronic production.