PGranular is a graphical front end to SuperCollider granular synthesis, that I created for my own sound experiments. It is a GUI based aid to make the process of exploring granular synthesis easier, but it's also conceived as an instrument to perform straight away with the sounds you create. It can be used with mouse, keyboard or MIDI for live performaces or automation via a Daw.
Start by importing into PGranular a wave file from your hardisk or by recording your own audio into PGranular in real time with a microphone.
Then create up to 10 selections, which represent your grains; for each selection you can tweak synthesis parameters such as size, position in the audio file, amplitude, pan, duration, pitch, randomization and a number of LFO's.
Finally play your selections either in a continuous loop or using a MIDI device. You can also assign different selections to these two modes and play them at the same time! Furthermore the MIDI mode lets you play your selections like a keyboard synthesizer or like a percussive element so as to make your own granular-flovoured percussive lines.
As the sound plays, you can adjust the synthesis parameters in real time via mouse, keyboard or MIDI and you can record new audio so that the granular synthesis will continue playing according to your parameter settings, but with new audio content underneath!
You can easily persist your synthesis paramteres settings and retrieve them later, so as not to loose your work once your shut your computer down.
PGranular leverages all the power of the SuperCollider synthesis and it is written in 100% sclang so you can run it straight from your favourite SuperCollider IDE/editor.
- Install SuperCollider together with the Synthesis Plugins and Extensions (PGranular depends on TGrains2 ). Both are available on the SuperCollider download page;
- Drop the PGranularExtensions folder in the extensions directory. You can find out
your extensions directory location by running
Platform.userExtensionDirorPlatform.systemExtensionDirin SuperCollider, respectively for the user specific and system extensions directories; - Run the code in PGranular.scd. This file can be placed anywhere you like, as long as PGranularSynths.scd is placed in the same directory.
PGranular has been tested on Windows only.