• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.9
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• pp.420-426
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• 2018

Acoustic Quanta, which British Physicist Dennis Gabor created, is the theoretical background for granular synthesis and has influenced many computer music artists and sound designers. Acoustic Quanta is a very short sound burst, lasting only 1 to 100 ms. Granular synthesis is a sound synthesis technique which slices original sound into sound grains and re-combines them into a new acoustic event. Concept of sound grain is borrowed from the acoustic quanta. Granular Synthesis can make very unique sound, so that it can be useful in many ways, especially in sound design. This paper presents concept of acoustic quanta and granular synthesis. It then discusses making a synthesizer as an implementation of synchronous granular synthesis and its applications on sound design. As a result, the duration of acoustic quanta should range between 0.239 and 33.367 ms, in consideration of audible frequencies, which is different from the original concept of the acoustic quanta.