The Granular Synthesis Of Curtis Roads

If you are interested in granular synthesis you may wish to check out Curtis Roads and his online videos. We recently received this biography of him via email...

Curtis Roads is part of the other path, the one that follows insane geniuses like Stockhausen and Morton Subotnik and uses whatever-period-it-happens-to-be's state-of-the-art computer technology to produce compositions that completely defy conventional music logic and sometimes sound more like a freaked-out ATM than tunes you put on and listen to.

Professor Roads' primary interests/methods are granular and pulsar synthesis. We're still trying to wrap our brains around pulsar, but from what we gather granular synthesis is where you break down individual notes and sounds into teensy tiny little bits (or "grains") and then reassemble them into music full of such microscopic nuances that it could only be fully appreciated by a man who's like some kind of computer-man or something. There's also this thing where the reconstituted microsounds don't produce actual, distinctive tones but nebulous sound masses that can be modulated in ways that regular sounds can't which we don't fully understand despite Roads' best efforts at explanationing.

More information:

• vbs,tv

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  3 Comments...  Post a comment    original story

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  Steve Sauve (karmafarm/geekweekend)    Said...

  You've managed to insult granular synthesis (hardly a novelty anymore), Curtis Roads, Stockhausen, Subotnick, and even your own kind. All kinds of electronic music "defies conventional music logic", if you define conventional music logic as reconstituted patches and drumloops tossed together in Reason.

  The small amount of Roads' minimalist music that's actually heard in the video is intriguing - what kind of "computer-man" do you think it takes to appreciate this?

  You don't understand granular synthesis, so you put it down, but you just come off as ignorant. So next time, please leave Roads off your site, and instead thrill us with yet another ho-hum hip-hop rip-off artist, or another virtual analog synth that does resonant filter sweeps (gosh!)

  16-May-09 07:29 AM

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  Nick B    Said...

  I'm not quite with you Steve, we posted this press item as a point of general interest, we did not make the video write the press item/biog.

  I'm not quite sure how this puts us in the firing line for your insults.

  16-May-09 08:55 AM

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  Steve Sauve (karmafarm/geekweekend)    Said...

  My apologies, Nick, for attributing the bio to Sonic State. I see that it was simply posted verbatim from wherever it came from.

  Sad that it puts a negative spin on an otherwise interesting subject.

  16-May-09 09:25 AM

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