Granular Synthesis and Other Posts

Some of the differences between OSC and MIDI are as follows:

1. MIDI defines a hardware interface, and OSC is typically transmitted over ethernet.
2. OSC allows someone to transmit multiple data types commonly used on modern computers, and MIDI only transmits integers.
3. OSC includes a high-precision timestamp with picosecond-resolution that allows OSC messages to be scheduled, recorded and reproduced with minimal jitter, and the MIDI beat-clock is a low-resolution clock having a precision on the order of several milliseconds at best.

Noise music is a class of music that consists of multiple discreet genres of sound that tend to disturb the categories of both sound and music. Noise music has been created by many well-known musical groups, including Throbbing Gristle (an English music and visual arts group that was established in 1975 [but now disbanded] that evolved from the performance art group COUM Transmissions), Keiji Haino (a Japanese musician and singer-songwriter since the 1970s whose work has included rock, free improvisation, noise music, percussion, psychedelic music, minimalism and drone music), Tony Conrad (an American avant-garde video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician/composer, sound artist, teacher and writer), and Psychic TV (a video art and music group that performs psychedelic, punk, electronic and experimental music).

Granular synthes is a basic sound synthesis method. It operates on the microsound time scale that is based on the same principle as sampling. However, the samples are not played back conventionally, but are instead split into small pieces of around 1 to 50 milliseconds. These small pieces are called grains. Grains may be layered on top of each other, and may play at different speeds, phases, volume, frequency, and more. Some well known musicians that have used granular synthesis include Barry Truax (a Canadian composer who specializes in real-time implementations of granular synthesis, often of sampled sounds, and soundscapes), Curtis Roads (a composer of electronic and electroacoustic music specializing in granular and pulsar synthesis, an author, and a computer programmer), and Iannis Xenakis (a Greek-French composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer who passed away in the year 2001).

Here are my 5 Granular samples that I created with Cicilia.

This first one I created mainly using uniform wave distribution in the stochastic generator.


This next one I created mainly using beta distribution of waves in the stochastic generator.

This one was created with a distribution setting called DroneAndJump.
This one was created with a distribution setting called Loopseg.
This one was created with a distribution setting called Drunk.