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Adaptive Concatenative Sound Synthesis and Its Application to Micromontage Composition

46 Computer Music Journal Adaptive concatenative sound synthesis (ACSS) is a recent technique for generating and transforming digital sound. Variations of sounds are synthesized from short segments of others in the manner of collage based on a measure of similarity. In electroacoustic music, this has been done by manually locating, categorizing, arranging, and splicing analog tape or digital samples—a style termed micromontage (Roads 2001, pp. 182–187). This is akin to performing granular synthesis by hand. Instead, ACSS provides an intuitive way to automate and control this procedure, freeing time for experimenting and composing with this flexible sound-synthesis technique. As an automation of micromontage methods informed by signal processing and extended to databases of any size, ACSS provides new paths for the art and science of sound collage. Sound synthesis and design—the general organization of sound objects—can develop in directions that are manually prohibitive. Additionally, ACSS provides a creative interface to large databases of sound, where the “query-byexample” paradigm becomes “synthesize-bysound-example.” Through several illustrative examples, including compositions exploring aspects of the algorithm, this article attempts to demonstrate the potential of ACSS for these applications. A brief history of micromontage and the concepts behind ACSS are presented. Several implementations are reviewed, and a new one is demonstrated and compared to these. Finally, its application to composing in the style of micromontage is explored and analyzed. In the end, it is argued that ACSS provides a flexible, intuitive, and natural way to shape sound. A Brief History of Micromontage