Granular synthesis
Building sound from many brief grains of audio, reassembled with independent control over density, pitch, and position.
Decomposing or building sound from many very brief “grains” of audio, each independently controllable in duration, pitch, and timing, then reassembled into a denser texture — a technique with roots in Dennis Gabor’s work on acoustic quanta. Iannis Xenakis proposed a theory of granular sound composition in a course at Indiana University in 1972; Curtis Roads, who attended, went on to program the first working implementation on UC San Diego’s mainframe in 1974 and later formalized the technique’s aesthetics and methods in his 2001 book Microsound.