In our first collaboration, we decided to explore the idea of depression. We spoke about the way depression slowly crawls into your life and how it begins to affect your mind, the way you think, and the way you feel. We wanted to project this degradation of the being, sonically, and we both agreed that the granular synthesis would be a good tool to project this idea. The granular synth was an effective tool that allowed us to process the different sections of the song creating fragmented, distorted versions of them which we then embed into the arrangement to show a progression of the distortion. We found that granulation is a good sonic metaphor to portray the way depression can feel to us, like a gradual fragmentation of who you are that can eventually descend into complete chaos.
The patch contains a live dial creating a randomized pitch variation in the grains. It also features a keyboard controlling the grain play speed. A buffer plays the samples from beginning to end automatically at original speed. The stereo auto gain takes any number of channels cutting it down to one channel and scaling the audio to normal clipping level. The patch also contains a recording device and two specs, each visualizing the buffer and the grain size.
Based on a Youtube tutorial by Oliver Thurley.