Swarm Granulator

This paper describes a Swarm Granulator, a new application of particle swarms to sound synthesis. Granulation, an established technique in sound synthesis, depends on many parameters which are non-intuitive and hard to control from a human perspective. It is proposed here that a particle swarm can organize these parameters and produce musically interesting and novel timbres. A crucial element of the system is the self-organization of grain parameters around attractors which themselves represent musical events and textures in an external environment. This means that Swarm Granulator is interactive, and not merely reactive.