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History of The Lexer Method
Granulation is a central part of the
piano+
performance system,
originally developed in Max/MSP between 2000 – 2012 to augment
an acoustic grand piano with electroacoustic processes
1
and extensively
used in my musical work over the past 20 years. Granular processes
enable working within the ambiguities of acoustic and electronically
modified sound. I always found it fascinating for electronically sustained
drones to emerge from a sound produced on an acoustic instrument. I
wanted a system that allowed me to play with aspects of the processing
taking control data from the acoustic playing, rather than playing along
with the electronics. It all seemed possible when first encountering
Nobuyasu Sakonda’s Granular 2.5 Max patch
2
– the first time I
experienced independent playback speed and pitch controls – and
Miller Puckette’s FFT based audio analysis tools
3
.
So rather than following the approach thought of and pioneered by
Xenakis
4
and Curtis Roads
5
, to see granulation as a synthesis tool to
create new sonic textures from the tiny fragments of recorded sound, I
was inspired to extend the sonic parameters of acoustic instruments as a
starting point for my artistic practice.
The fundamental approach for
arbhar
utilises granulation techniques on
audio captured in real-time in response to the sounds produced by the
acoustic instrument or sound source. Playing back multiple instances of
grains which are out of phase with one another to create the illusion that
the sound is continuous. As few as eight grains of approximately 80ms
length are sufficient to create convincing results retaining an acoustic
resemblance to the original. As the sample position and pitch of the
playback can be independently controlled, the user has the possibility
of ‘tuning’ into selected fragments using any controller, random or
sequenced source, considered appropriate. Aspects of random deviation
of parameters – a feature that has proven far more important than grain
count to achieve convincing organic sounding granular textures – allow
further adaptation to create organic sounding drones and textures, but
