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GrainMill extracts small pieces or "grains" from a sound and recombines them, usually many times over, to form a new sound. This process is known as granulation, or, more commonly, granular synthesis. In GrainMill, grains can be very short (less than 20 milliseconds), or several seconds in length. They can be spread very thinly, leaving gaps, or very thickly, creating extremely dense textures.
A commonly used analogy is with the work of impressionist painters such as Seurat, who created pictures using very small points of color (the pointillist style), closely packed together.
The power and flexibility of GrainMill arises from the ability to dynamically adjust many variables including grain size, density, spacing, pitch, loudness and stereo position by means of user-created Time Contours (also known as Breakpoint Files). Depending on how these variables are set, a wide variety of effects and transformations can be created. GrainMill is thus a compositional tool, as well as a program for making a wide range of unusual and vivid sound effects.
Features
- Timestretching (to extreme degrees of up to 256 times)
- Pitch shifting
- Echo and reverb effects
- Chorusing and double-tracking
- Generation of dense "clouds" of sound, or sparse pointillist textures
- Subtle and extreme random panning and spatialization (doesn't sound mechanical)
- Add human erratic and random shimmers and wobbles to over-exact synthetic sounds
- "Brassage" or shuffling effects where a large chunk of the source sound is searched for grains where the start and end of the source may overlap in the result, and some bits may even sound backwards.
- Supports parameters which can be any of the following: a single value or time-varying value (time/value breakpoint data), random within a range (min & max specified), time-varying ranges (time/value breakpoint data applied to the upper and lower range limits) enables highly sophisticated evolving sounds.
Purchase Information
Requirements
- Windows 95/98/2000/NT
- Pentium (high-speed Pentium recommended)
- Sound card
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