in JG’s Blog
28 August 2009
An implementation of granular synthesis in Max/MSP.
Pulsar synthesis is a type of granular synthesis whereby grains are ordered in time as a pulsar train. Varying the duty cycle of a pulsaret and its following silence, but maintaining the overall pulsar period gives an effect much like a band-pass filter.
In this Max/MSP patch, all parameters are available: pulsar period, pulsar duty cycle, pulsar probability and “spray”.
Pulsaret and pulsaret envelope waveforms are read from buffers allowing any arbitrary waveforms to be used. Pulsars are passed through a gate that can randomly turn each pulsar on or off, depending on the probability value. A “spray” parameter assigns each pulsar to a randomly selected output channel. The number of channels can be specified by the user.
Processing is done entirely in the audio domain allowing high frequency pulsar trains.
Simple pulsar train:
Roads (2001) suggests that transforming pulsar synthesis with convolution can lead to interesting sounds. Here is a quick example I tried.
Pulsar synthesis with convolution:
A more detailed description of pulsar synthesis can be found in:
Roads, Curtis (2001) Microsound. Cambridge: MIT Press
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