Curtis Roads Part 1: The Breakdown

YouTube via DellLounge

"Curtis Roads is a true composer. While he may not be a superstar hitmaker producing songs for Madonna and Brittany Spears, his scholarly approach is to create sounds youve never heard before. Using a process known as granular synthesis and software he invented, Roads breaks swarms of sounds down into millisecond-long slivers."

Curtis Roads Part 2: Getting Granular


"Microsound encompasses any sound thats so short it couldnt fit on the normal musical time scale. In terms of measurement, youre talking anywhere from 10 milliseconds to 1/10 of a second."

Curtis Roads Part 3: Build It Up


"No doubt about it, Curtis Roads compositions are virtuosic. Even though a single piece can take half a decade or longer to make, hes released tons of recordings and has more in the works."

Update via Rory VICE/VBS.tv Be sure to see the comments of this post for more info as well.

"There are two divergent streams in 20th century electronic music: The one most people are familiar with starts out with goofballs like Jean-Jacques Perrey and Vangelis noodling around on synthesizers and eventually devolves into Kaja Googoo. Curtis Roads is part of the other path, the one that follows insane geniuses like Stockhausen and Morton Subotnik and uses whatever-period-it-happens-to-be's state-of-the-art computer technology to produce compositions that completely defy conventional music logic and sometimes sound more like a freaked-out ATM than tunes you put on and listen to.

Professor Roads' primary interests/methods are granular and pulsar synthesis. We're still trying to wrap our brains around pulsar, but from what we gather granular synthesis is where you break down individual notes and sounds into teensy tiny little bits (or "grains") and then reassemble them into music full of such microscopic nuances that it could only be fully appreciated by a man who's like some kind of computer-man or something. There's also this thing where the reconstituted microsounds don't produce actual, distinctive tones but nebulous sound masses that can be modulated in ways that regular sounds can't which we don't fully understand despite Roads' best efforts at explaining."

Update via Alfred in the comments: "Cloud Generator can be found here. Mac OS 9 only
ftp://ftp.create.ucsb.edu/pub/CloudGenerator"