Microcosm: Granular Synthesis Sound Toy

Microcosm is a sonic cloud, made of thousands of grains of sound. It works like a snow globe. Move the device in any direction and gravity pulls the particles towards earth, causing the sound to evolve. Shake Microcosm and the sound shatters into pieces. Choose from several included soundscapes. 

Features:

• Real-Time Granular Synthesis sound engine. 
• Particle physics engine with color dynamics and accelerometer controls 
• 3D audio positioning – zoom in to hear the sounds up-close, or zoom out to hear them from far away.
• 3 soundscapes based on high-quality audio samples (more coming soon!)

What is Granular Synthesis?

Essentially, Granular Synthesis works by cutting up an audio recording into incredibly small pieces, and then playing these 'microsound' clips in unconventional ways. The result is a soundscape, or cloud. 

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Who made this?

Microcosm was developed at Apposite Labs, a California based technology company which specializes in experimental user-interface design.

Audio Licensing Information

Microcosm includes audio samples from Freesound.org. We would like to thank the original creators and credit their work:

http://www.freesound.org/people/kaponja/sounds/23193/

http://www.freesound.org/people/HerbertBoland/sounds/128547/