Cut a sound into thousands of tiny grains, then scatter, stretch, freeze and re-pitch them. See every grain where it is read and where it sounds.
MP3, WAV, OGG or FLAC. Stereo is mixed to mono and the first 30 s are used; the file stays on your device.
Short grains turn the source into a buzz or a texture, long ones into smeared copies of it. Spray scatters where they read, Pitch resamples every grain.
Freeze holds the play head still; otherwise it moves through the source at the Speed setting (1× = the source's own speed).
Renders 10 seconds of the cloud with the current settings, starting at the play head, and downloads it as a WAV.
100% in your browser - your files never leave your device.
Start with the built-in sung chord, made in code, or use your own audio file. It is decoded in your browser and never uploaded.
Drag the play head on the waveform, then set Size, Density, Spray and Pitch. Freeze holds the play head still; Speed lets it wander through the source.
Render 10 seconds of the cloud with the current settings and download it as a WAV for any sampler or DAW.
Granular synthesis cuts a sound into grains: short slices, usually 5 to 500 milliseconds long, each faded in and out by a smooth window so it starts and ends in silence. Played one after another at their original place, the grains rebuild the sound. Played from somewhere else, at another pitch or in a crowd, they make something new.
Four controls do most of the work. Size sets how long each grain is: very short grains blur into a buzz whose pitch comes from the grain rate, long ones sound like smeared copies of the source. Density sets how many grains start per second. Spray scatters where each grain reads around the play head, which turns a single moment into a shimmering cloud. Pitch resamples every grain, so the cloud can sound an octave up without playing any faster.
Because the play head and the playback speed are separate, granular synthesis can stretch time. Freeze the play head and a single syllable becomes an endless drone; let it crawl at a quarter of the speed and a phrase lasts four times as long at its original pitch. This is how granular time stretching, Paulstretch-style ambience and the famous Mutable Instruments Clouds module work.
When many grains overlap, their levels add up. Grains read unrelated parts of the sound, so they add up like noise: the loudness grows with the square root of the number of overlapping grains. This playground divides each grain by that square root, which keeps the level steady whether two grains or fifty are sounding at once.
A very short piece of the source, shaped by a Hann window (a smooth rise and fall) so it has no click at either end. Every grain has its own read position, length and pitch.
It is inspired by how Clouds behaves, with the same core controls (position, size, density, spray, pitch and freeze), but it is our own code and has none of Clouds' effects such as its reverb or spectral modes.
It stops the play head, so every new grain reads from the same moment of the source. Spray still scatters them around that point, which turns a frozen moment into a living texture.
Each grain is scaled by one over the square root of the average number of grains overlapping. Unrelated grains add up like noise, so this keeps the loudness about the same from sparse clicks to a dense cloud.
No. Your file is decoded, cut into grains and rendered in your browser, and the WAV is saved straight from it. Only the first 30 seconds are used, mixed to mono.
TuttiDAW has samplers, synths and effects, from granular delay to wavetable, right in your browser. Free to start.
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