Particles, grains and birds. Flocks, swarms and clouds
Clouds is a granular audio processor like no other.
Clouds is focused on the realtime granularization of incoming audio signals, and their transformation into amorphous textures.
Grains of adjustable size, pitch and envelope, are extracted at controllable time offsets from the input signal. Grains are seeded randomly, periodically, or whenever the module receives a trigger.
The textures generated by Clouds are extremely thick, partly because of the large number of concurrent grains (up to 60), partly because of a built-in allpass diffuser and reverberator, smearing the shortest transient into a wash of noise - giving the illusion of an even larger number of simultaneous grains.
A list of things Clouds is not trying to be: a sample player, a slicer, a looper.
Audio buffer acquisition
- Stereo I/O. Even with a mono recording buffer, a wide stereo output can still be simulated by randomly panning grains or through the stereo reverberator.
- Stereo pre-amp with a gain range covering modular and line levels.
- Recording buffer size: 1s (32kHz, stereo) to 8s (16kHz, µ-law, mono).
- The FREEZE button and the corresponding gate input freezes the content of the recording buffer, allowing you to dive into its sonic details.
- 4 memory slots for storing and recalling buffers.
Granular synthesis
- Grain generation time base: periodical, randomized, or externally clocked.
- The POSITION knob selects from which part of the recording buffer the grains are extracted.
- Grain size from 16ms to 1s.
- Up to 40 to 60 concurrent grains (depending on recording buffer resolution).
- Transposition from -2 octaves to +2 octaves, with V/O tracking.
- Grain envelope continuously variable between boxcar, triangle and Hann functions.
- CV inputs for all grain parameters, individually sampled and held by each grain. For stochastic, Xenakis-style explorations, try feeding random voltages to those!
- Diffusion network with 4 All-pass filters to post process the granularized signals.
Post-processing (“blending”) settings
4 post-processing parameters are controlled by the BLEND knob and CV input:
- Dry/wet balance.
- Random panning amount.
- Feedback amount.
- Reverb amount.
Specifications
- Input impedances: 100k.
- Audio input gain range: line level to modular level.
- CV range: +/- 5V. CVs outside of this range are simply clipped.
- Internal processing: 32kHz, 32-bit floating point. RAM Recording buffer uses 16-bit (high quality) or 8-bit µ-law (low quality) resolution.