what does granular mean in the experimental electronic context?

gritty

lofi

Try here for an explanation:

http://music.calarts.edu/~eric/gs.html

or this one, more concise

http://www.sfu.ca/~truax/gran.html

and the friendly modern face of consumer-level granular wanking:

http://www.grmtools.org/quicktour/qtclassicrtas/shuffling.html

oh damn...matthew weiner to thread!

gary nelson to thread!

midi horn to thread!

bad memories of attending The Oberlin College Conservatory of Music Technology in Related Arts Program to thread!

Granular synthesis in layman's terms is a method of synthesis in which a sound is divided up into many small parts, and those small parts can be isolated, multiplied, expanded and contracted, or effected in their own right. Some common results are that a sound can appear to be inflated into a 'cloudy' sound, chopped up into small gritty sounding pieces, etc.

It gets a lot more academic than that but a lot of current software allows for kinds of really off-the-cuff experimentation with these methods.

Paul Dickow aka Strategy (www.kranky.net)

Actually sounds pretty interesting! Strikes me as a different conceptual term for what could be called glitch, though.

Granular is much more broad though -- glitch is one of a million outcomes of granular synthesis.

Feel free to say more (comparative examples, etc.)

Granular is quite different from what we commonly hear as glitch music.

Glitch is generally the use of a mistake to emphasize another aspect of the song. Generally it does not really change the structure of most music it mereley serves as a different element or instrument. Granular synthesis has the ability to create those moments within it, but it also has the ability to do much more.

The idea of sound clouds is the one that most readily springs to mind.
Whose academic elements I am probably not schooled enough to discuss, but I know it when I hear it.

Ned, Christian Marclay and Yasunao Tone come to mind as examples of artists working in glitch but not granular synthesis. As Mark pointed out, glitch is an outcome, a product, reached not just w/g.s., but also by using scotch tape, scratched records, randomly skipping minidiscs, et cet. Granular is a process, and the outcome is often not very "grainy/pixelated sounding" at all.

NB It's also almost always used to mean just that.

I always thought of glitch as much as a specific sound as a process, and it seems to have come up after stuff like Oval, it was the idea of taking these digital glitchs and making music out of them.

Granular synthesis comes from a much more academic background, and doesn't even necessarily imply the "synthesis." I think the idea of granular composition predates synthesis perhaps? I recall a professor at Oberlin who's sound sources were all these godforsaken E-MU Proteus presets, but he'd use Opcode Max (this is during pre-software synths time, Max was primarily a MIDI composition tool) and often the sounds would be selected at random, however, they'd be only played for the tiniest fraction of time and there'd be hundreds of little sound events in short periods of time. And he controlled much of this with a MIDI horn, thus my post upthread.

sorry, I mean "the idea of granular composition predates software synthesis" or what I'm trying to say is what Elliott said in a way, that it's a composition process not necessarily related to the synthesis of sound.

Granular synthesis is used quite often in the past few years, as it is included in many modules for Reaktor, Ableton Live and other software music production tools.

You will hear it used on a bunch of artists on the Clicks & Cuts series from Mille Plateaux and it is all over Phoenecia, Monolake, Kit Clayton, Richard Devine and related artist's tracks.

If you want to check out what you can do with some granular synthesis, you can down load demos of Audio Mulch and Ableton Live, which have effects/synths that utilize this technique. Just load up a wav file and twist way. The grain delay effect in Ableton Live is quite fun.

Is Csound a programming language for gran. synth?

csound is a VERY general language for digital synthesis, it predates any widespread use of granular synthesis but I imagine the technique must be available within csound by now

Barry Truax's site, linked above, also contains many sound samples from his pieces including 'riverrun' from 1986, the breakthrough digital granular synthesis piece.

http://www2.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/excerpts/excerpts.html