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Calcium Cowboy

from Cherish The Pale Blue Dot by Thomas Wulfe

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the eighth synthesis techniques challenge - In this weekly series we'll explore the myriad of ways one can synthesize sound.
This week, we're finishing up what's effectively been a 3-week series on modulating amplitude in weird and fun ways by delving into my most-used version thereof: granular synthesis. Granular, as I think most of y'all know, involves taking input audio, cutting it up into tiny bits of audio (grains), and playing them back with various grain shapes and spacing. What you may not know is you can do granular synthesis with enough VCAs and LFOs! There's a lot of ways to think about granular. Some people think it's only about samples, some people say it's a purely digital process but can be done with live audio and a continuous buffer, but our old friend from last week, Curtis Roads, tells us in an article from 1988, "granular synthesis involves generating thousands of very short sonic grains to form larger acoustic events. The technique can be classified as a form of additive synthesis, since sounds results from the additive combination of thousands of grains." Now, that tells me 2 things: 1) this is very resource intensive, and 2) it doesn't really matter how we generate the grains. He does further detail more exact specifications for grain shape, size, and goes as far as to say each grain can have its own duration, waveform, and amplitude, which simply isn't practical for most applications. As such, I'll leave this pretty open. You can use as many or few grains as you want, with what ever shapes you want, as long as a cohesive sound is created. Modulation and subtle external effects like light reverb are open. Have fun, and I'll have a new one next Friday!

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from Cherish The Pale Blue Dot, released January 12, 2023

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Thomas Wulfe UK

As part of the waxcide collective, Thomas Wulfe Its the alias i have been unsing for Ambient, IDM, Chillout, Electronica, Breakbeat, Trip-Hop and more for near 25 years. Influenced by artists such as Orbital, Underworld and Richard D. James, I love using both hardware and software synthesisers, sampling, computers and especially analogue modular synths ... more

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