Granula: Ambient Playground

Granula is a granular synthesizer for the phone. It takes a sound — a chord it generates itself, a guitar, a kalimba, a tongue drum, or thirty seconds you record on the spot — and scatters it into hundreds of tiny overlapping grains. What comes back is a slow, shifting texture: ambient pads, drones, atmospheres that keep evolving as long as you keep listening.

Everything is played with your hands. The whole screen is a morph pad: move a finger across it and the sound moves with you, while a field of glyphs lights up under your touch and churns in time with what you hear.

FOUR CORNERS, FOUR CHARACTERS

• Reverse — short grains, played mostly backwards, with octave and fifth sparkles on top • Gater — a denser cloud chopped on a 126 BPM grid, from halves down to sixteenths • Chorus — long, slow, detuned grains with the read position drifting like a tide • Scatter — harmonic intervals thrown at random and sprayed wide

FOUR KNOBS

• Grain size, from 15 ms clicks to one-second smears • Position — where in the sample the grains are lifted from • Density, from sparse drips to a solid wash • Dry/Wet — a six-second convolution reverb, plus the amount of reversed grains

RECORD THE WORLD

Hold the record button and capture up to thirty seconds of anything: your voice, a room, rain on a window, a string you plucked once. The take is granulated immediately and kept in your library under a name of its own. You can also import your own MP3 or WAV files.

MADE FOR A PHONE

• Keeps playing with the screen locked and in the background • Survives calls, headphone unplugs and output switches without losing your session • Plays through the silent switch, like an instrument should • Any class-compliant USB or Bluetooth MIDI keyboard plays it — plug in and go, nothing to pair inside the app • Honours Reduce Motion

GRANULA PRO

Every built-in sound is free and stays free. A free account also brings in one sound of your own — recorded or imported. Granula Pro lifts that limit: record and import as much as you like, and everything syncs to your account so a new phone picks up where the last one left off.

Discovery signals