:sonic: Having the ability to add different effects to individual grains or groups of grains could be quite interesting. This way you could mix between them to get really dynamic changes as opposed to the oftentimes static sounds you get with granular. E.g. imagine going from a long, reverby/chorusy pad sound and then slowly mixing in heavily distorted grains to arrive at something aggressive. I think having in-depth control over the pitch of the grains would also be important so that you could shift from sounds that resemble the source material to things that are more outlandish and aleatoric. You could even go crazy and include LFOs and such to control the mix/ratio of these differently effected "streams" to make them pulsating/gated/rhythmic.
No clue about feasibility, just an idea.
Phase Plant indeed, but I think I hear what you're saying about more complex pitch control. You know what'd be crazy, is like a canvas overlaying basically a piano roll or CC lane, notes (or *any parameter*) over time, and you basically painted in midi cc data over the piano roll/giant mseg-but-not, big pitch cc curves but each color or repeated stroke/heatmap intensity over a region represents probability the grains will propagate from that position/parameterization, vs a different line or something, or that you could outline notes+probabilities that the grain generation would default to and then enter other regions above, and map those different colors or regions to macro buttons or knobs and basically fade the behavior of grains to wherever you've painted.
Or just have a separate "parameter playhead" to scrub over the CC data/parametric "zones". Would totally work for other parameters besides pitch! Sample offset/start, envelopes, effects, even output channel and stuff... And all would be polyphonic, per-voice... ideally!
Offering scale recognition (and then automatic interval snapping when changing notes) would be sort of good for some of that suggestion, though, as these features sound like they favor granular synthesis based around a single note; being able to use some way to remap pitch values based on interval so the tones from the pitch "table" was slightly more favorable for polyphony could help. And/or instead of a midi cc brush, perhaps essentially midi note blocks could be placed on a grid very similar to a piano roll, but less as a sequence and more as a path for automation or modulation to traverse.
Before that I was just gonna say there's... "concatenative synthesis"? or something, it's like granular but the grains are algrithmically (and/or otherwise?) rearranged into new textures. Could be cool?
I agree with the above poster - multiple start points is a great thing. Padshop is decent for that, also Phase Plant; honestly what I described in Paragraph 1 Section B also sounds like Phase Plant, but I'm meaning to suggest that perhaps a different way of interfacing, such as primarily with a single giant MSEG/canvas/piano roll,
might be more conducive to the kind of way I think people doing granular want to be thinking about the sound. And also that controlling the parameters before a grain is generated and not afterward is a useful difference, i.e. for pitch automation especially so grains themselves are not (or are) rising in pitch over the course of their envelope.
) and they were wondering what type of features or functionality people are interested in.
