This piece is made by a granular synthesizer whose grains are user-controlled harmonics of a fundamental root.

I started this piece without any live user input. I made functions to create a long pitch "root" and grains whose frequencies are a geometric series of a particular ratio, and hard-coded the order progession of the piece. I manually tweaked different parameters, and got a sense for which ones had the most dramatic impact and would be best to control with a continuous user mouse input. I decided on the grain length and tuning ratio to be controlled by the X and Y directions of the mouse. I also made a few number keys control the fundamental pitch on which the frequencies of the grains were based.

Although the grains in this piece come from an oscillator rather than a microphone recording or a sample with more variety, and thus this piece could habe been created with a bunch of oscillators rather than a LiSa, the granular synthesis perspective still fundamentally shaped the nature of this piece. The texture is defined by its granularity. The lower notes last longer, becuase they are being played back at a lower rate, which would not have occurred with an oscillator. I also tried to replace my sine grains with short audio samples of voices, instruments, or other sounds. I learned that looping short samples can be quite noisey, as the periodicity of the sample contributes to the sonority when loop and sped up. In future granular experiments. I will use longer samples or not loop them. I found LiSa's rampUp() and rampDown() functions very useful for fading nicely into and out of each grain. I had been trying to do so manually and had quite some difficulty.