The granular synthesis of sounds involves the production of thousands of short sonic particles (for example, 30 milliseconds) in order to form larger sound events [4]. This synthesis technique is inspired by Denis Garbor's proposition that larger complex sound events are composed of simple acoustic particles, or sonic grains [7]; he suggested that a granular representation can be used to describe sounds with complex morphology. Norbert Wiener [8] also adopted a "granular" representation of sounds to measure the information content of a sonic message. It was the composer Iannis Xenakis [9], however, who suggested the first theory of granular synthesis for musical purposes. Since then, a few others (Barry Truax [5] and Curtis Roads [10], for example) have also proposed granular synthesis systems.

So far, most of these systems use stochastic methods to control the production of sonic particles (for example, density and duration of particles). In Chaosynth we propose a different method: the use of cellular automata (CA).

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