SoundScape : granular synthesis tool

Abstract

Musicians, composers and sound producers exploit the nature of sound, and use it to express their artistic feelings. Artists always looked for different means to produce new and interesting sounds, in fact a lot of tools like acoustic musical instruments were invented. The introduction of sound synthesis and digital music offered the composers a landscape of new sounds which can be produced. Granular synthesis is one of the many sound synthesis techniques, and the typical outputs, produced by granular synthesis, are complex and exciting textures of sound that are very difficult to produce using other synthesis techniques. In this project we study in detail this technique, in order to implement a tool that can be used by musicians and composers to produce sound. Granular synthesis can be a bit difficult to use, since it involves a number of parameters as input, that may require the user either to understand in depth how the main algorithm works, and what's the effect of each parameter, or else gain enough experience by using a granular synthesis application. Therefore in this project we also propose an intelligent interactive system where the user is assisted by a genetic algorithm, in a process to produced a sound.