A two-level method to control granular synthesis

This paper presents a formal system for the algorithmic control of composition based on granular synthesis. The system features two description levels: a low level, that organizes grains into a graph structure, and a high level, that distributes the graphs of the low level in specific locations of a space. A composition is a trajectory in the space, appropriately interpreted to control a number of parameters of physical and musical relevance. The paper is organized as follows: first, we introduce the composition process with granular synthesis and we briefly outline the current approaches to control; second, we describe the formal system in terms of the two levels that compose it; finally, we see how the system can be viewed as a generalization of the note approach and the stochastic approach.