TipTop Audio - Grain de Folie Granular ZDSP Cartridge
Expansion Cartridge for the TipTop Audio ZDSP
UK Delivery - From £2.99
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The stock information shows the quantity of units that are available to purchase at the Guildford store and the quantity of units that are available at our off-site Guildford warehouse. These stock levels are updated in real time.
Our Click and Collect service is available at our Guildford store from 10am - 6pm Monday to Saturday, and 11am - 5pm on Sunday. You can either choose click and collect as your delivery option online or, during store opening hours, call our sales team at 01483 456777 to place a 10% deposit.
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If the only available stock is in our off-site warehouse it can be brought to the store location for you to try - you just need to contact the store within opening hours. Please note any requests received after 3.30pm will not arrive at the store until the following morning.
Please be aware that, unless you have paid a deposit to reserve the item, it will continue to be free, both online and in-store, for another customer to buy. Therefore we would advise you to place a 10% deposit by either using the on-line click and collect service or calling us 01483 456777.
SKU: TT-GDFZ-CARD
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Product Description
Granular Synthesis uses small slices of sounds (grains) to compose new sounds from existing material. By combining multiple grains of differing lengths, amplitude, pitch, and speed, new sounds are created which are often very different from the original sound recorded in. Xenakis claims to have invented the technique and, indeed, his “Analogique A-B”, composed of tiny tape splices of pure tones, is credited as the first piece of granular music back in 1959.
In the context of the Z-DSP, a block of memory is set to hold digital samples for playback: the Z-DSP has one second of memory for the audio used in processing. From this audio buffer, the grains will be sampled and modified for playback with the number of grains determining how dense the overall output sounds. These programs have 3, 4 or 6 grains for playback. Each grain plays from a random point in the audio buffer and have an independent envelope controlling their duration. The envelope time is the “grain size” parameter in many of the programs.
The French phrase for the cartridge is “Grain de Folie”, which could be translated as “seeds of madness”, but in French “grain” also translates to “grain” and “madness” evokes the strange disassembling/reassembling granular process. Also, “avoir un grain de folie” is a typically expression to describe people behaving in a non-conventional way, thus a fitting play on words that quite nicely describes the unpredictable nature of this set of algorithms.