I have taken a pause from the main program to consider options for incorporating the data that Finlo is preparing regards the seasonal growth of biomass and, potentially, the ‘amplitude’ changes to the regular rising and falling of feeding depths in the ocean.

Granular synthesis is increasingly popular among Max developers, and has become somewhat of a cliche in computer music. However, in its basic capacity to process small fragments of sound and represent them individually, as grains, and the ability to have a great deal of flexibility as to the length and frequency/ occurrence of these grains it does suggest a good method of representing the swarming growth of biomass. and pay also suggest a method whereby we can bring in archival sound recordings.

My main concern had been the burden that would be placed on the already stretched CPU cycles - but having gone through a couple of Federico Foderaro’s granular synthesis tutorials it seems that making use of the new mc functionality within Max 8 (essentially, internalising multichannel routing into the program logic) affords a lot of functionality with very little overhead. So, it seems this project will be my introduction to mc objects as well as granular processing.