Today I spent some time in Ableton, experimenting with textures and processing using Granulator 3. I’d been reading Curtis Roads’ Microsound and wanted to try out some of the ideas he talks about, especially how granular synthesis lets you work at an incredubly small scale of sound, where texture becomes the focus instead of rhythm or melody.
I started with a recording of metal-on-metal hits, it is already quite dynamic and tonally tonally rich, so it allows for a lot of variation while the sonic palette remains cohesive.
Once I loaded them into Granulator 3, I set up some random LFOs modulating grain position, spray, and grain size. I didn’t want to exert too much control over it, instead I wanted to set something in motion and listen to what it does. This approach was partly inspired by Mark Fell, who talks about building systems that generate results rather than directly composing every detail. I like that idea and I’ve been exploring it a bit recently, trying not to be too picky over details, just setting up a situation and then curating what comes out of it.
I initially intentionally avoided heavy post-processing to retain the purity of the grains and focus on their internal textures as Curtis Roads talks about, but I ended up enjoying the process of just seeing where the sound goes too much and ended up creating an audio effect rack containing phase distortion, corpus, grain delay, and convolution reverb all with various parameters being modulated by different LFOs on random settings.
I grouped it into an instrument rack and audio effect rack, set various parameters to macros, and pressed the ‘random’ button on the rack, listening to the results and just observing.
This process helped me reflect on the role of intention vs emergence in digital composition. By not over-determining every element and allowing randomness to play a significant role, I discovered moments of texture and detail that I probably wouldn’t have arrived at if i was using more determined approach. This connects not only with Mark Fell’s philosophy but with acousmatic listening, where the origin of a sound is abstracted and texture and gesture play more significant roles.
This experiment deepened my understanding of granular synthesis and allowed me to engage critically with both theory and practice based around emergence and microsound.
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