Metasurfing = Dubsahara = Evolution in metamorphose agglutinous phonemes. In 1999 when this album was produced, only a handfull of sonic surfers had caught onto a new wave of sound. Granular synthesis is arguably the latest form of synthesis in the relatively short history of Synthesized sounds which evolved because raw computing power had allowed for high level Digital Signal Processing (DSP) to occur in realtime.
Metasurfing aka Greg Hunter was one of the sonic pioneers of Granular synthesis who produced what we know as the first Granular Synthesis Fusion album back in 1999. The exceptional fusion of previously unheard granulated sounds and processed global rhythms & melody made for a novel Sonosphere that remain a uniquely enchanting experience . It has long been on the Sangita Sounds playlist and we are in grains of delight at the re-release of this modern classic.
Listen to the complete Album here :-
An excerpt from an article on Granular Synthesis:-
Granular synthesis is a catch-all term for a number of different audio systems that work by using tiny snippets of sound that can be manipulated individually and are recombined to generate the final output. The majority of granular systems available use audio files/samples as their raw material. Samples are sliced up (behind the scenes) into a series of tiny sections, each usually between one 100th and one 10th of a second in duration. Each slice is known as a ‘grain’, and a sequence of grains is called a ‘graintable’. If the software made up a graintable which played back all the grains extracted from a given sample in their original sequence and at the original speed, then you’d hear the original sample reproduced. If the software played the sequence back more slowly, gaps would appear between the slices, so the current slice in the graintable is usually looped. Played back more quickly, each grain overlaps with the next one, or some grains get skipped depending on how the software works. To avoid clicks and glitches, each grain is faded in and out with a volume envelope, a process known as ‘smoothing’.
Taken from Sound on Sound Magazine :-
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec05/articles/granularworkshop.htm
