hello,

granular synthesis is roughly based on sampling.
the sampled material is chopped into very tiny parts,
called grains. every grain gets an own envelope (to smooth
the edges), pitch and time information, often also some jitter
and offset parameters. the fact that every grain can
play at any time consequently means that more than one
grain can play back at the same time, which is what a
monophonic wavetable device like the a112 cannot do.

with granular synthesis (or better granular resynthesis)
samples can be vaporized into dense sound clouds,
when using noise as modulator.

in the granular resynthesis model pitch and playback speed
are independent from each other, so other obvious applications
are time stretching and pitch/formant shifting.

that is just a very basic explanation, you'll find
more detailed info on the web for sure.

best wishes

ingo

--- In Doepfer_a100@yahoogroups.com , sfrules <sfrules@t...> wrote:
> Hello
>
> What does "granular synthesis" mean
>
> Thanks,
>
> sfrules