Granular Analysis/Synthesis for Simple and Robust Transformations of Complex Sounds

In this paper, a novel and user-friendly granular analysis/synthesis system particularly geared towards environmental sounds is presented. A granular analysis component and a grain synthesis component were intended to be implemented separately so as to achieve more flexibility. The grain analysis component segments a given sound into many ‘grains’ that are believed to be microscopic units that define an overall sound. A grain is likely to account for a local sound event generated from a microscopic interaction between objects. Segmentation should be able to successfully isolate these local sound events in a physically or perceptually meaningful way. The second part of the research was focused on the granular synthesis that can easily modify and re-create a given sound. The granular synthesis system would feature flexible time modification with which the user could re-assign the timing of grains and adjust the time-scale. Also, the system would be capable of cross-synthesis given the target sound and the collection of grains obtained through an analysis of sounds that might not include grains from the target one.