Spatial Grains: Imbuing Granular Particles With Spatial-Domain Information

Granular synthesis techniques have been appropriated for 3D sound spatialisation in a number of ways, such as the spatial encoding of individual grains. This paper proposes a new technique that aims to use the spatial information already encoded in ambisonic signals, the principle hypothesis being that this encoding is actually retained at the granular level. This opens up exciting new possibilities for spatial sound. The paper outlines some of these possibilities but focuses primarily on the synthesis of non-point sources of sound which forms the basis for a second hypothesis, involving functions that relocate spatially encoded grains in time.