In 1947, Dennis Gabor introduced the idea that sounds can be represented by a series of elementary "grains," each grain being a short pulse containing both temporal and frequency information. Greek composer Iannis Xenakis is known as the inventor of the granular synthesis technique, having expanded upon Gabor's theoretical foundation.[1][page needed]
The composer Iannis Xenakis (1960) was the first to explicate a compositional theory for grains of sound. He began by adopting the following lemma: "All sound, even continuous musical variation, is conceived as an assemblage of a large number of elementary sounds adequately disposed in time. In the attack, body, and decline of a complex sound, thousands of pure sounds appear in a more or less short interval of time
Δ
�
{displaystyle Delta t}." Xenakis created granular sounds using analog tone generators and tape splicing. These appear in the composition Analogique A-B for string orchestra and tape (1959).[2]
Curtis Roads was the first to implement granular synthesis on a computer in 1974. [3]
Twelve years later, in 1986, the Canadian composer Barry Truax implemented real-time versions of this synthesis technique using the DMX-1000 Signal Processing Computer.[4] "Granular synthesis was implemented in different ways by Truax."
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