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Curtis Roads: “Eleventh Vortex”
From the album Point Line Cloud (2005)
Among the most fascinating and distinctive techniques of sound generation to emerge in the 20th century is granular synthesis, based on the principle of breaking sound waves down to their smallest units, processing these “sonic particles” in various ways (filtration, transposition, temporal distention), and reconfiguring them into new musical structures.
First imagined in the 1940s, granular synthesis took off only with the advent of digital sound processing, although Xenakis pioneered granular methods with magnetic tape in the 1950s.
Music composed via granular synthesis is typically characterized by skittering, chaotic textures, but as this example shows, it is also compatible with moments of stillness and harmonic repose.
Roads has written a fabulous book called Microsound, which offers a thorough but readable introduction to the aesthetics and techniques of granular synthesis.
“Beneath the level of the note lies another multilayered stratum, the microsonic hierarchy. Like the quantum world of quarks, leptons, gluons, and bosons, the microsonic hierarchy was long invisible. Modern tools let us view and manipulate the microsonic layers from which all acoustic phenomena emerge.” (Curtis Roads, Microsound, p. 3)
Played 92 time(s).
August 07, 2009, 10:46am
