The first time I had heard of Robert Henke, also known as Monolake was when I began to learn about granular synthesis in my creative sound projects module, already I was in love with the process, using the Cecelia 5 module to really experiment and test it’s limits. I found (and do still feel this way) that it was such an advanced and versatile tool, you are able to completely derive sounds from their sources without sacrificing any sense of naturality or character. And so seeing that Robert Henke had developed not one but two granular synthesis based instruments for Ableton live I was amazed, in order to do such a thing it must take a total mastery and understanding of the process. What is surprising to me is that granular synthesis is not a new process and so I was wondering what might come next, what new processes would come to ‘wow’ me in the future?
I took the opportunity to ask Robert himself what he thought the ‘next big thing’ would be. Interestingly, he brought up the idea of the power of AI. I have definitely felt that machine learning could help with things like noise reduction and repair of audio but Robert brought up the point that it could do wonders for cataloguing and searching for sounds when composing. Robert’s vision was of a cloud of sounds that one could select from, each one similar to the other, this would allow for a wider range of textures used without sacrificing the soul and atmosphere of a piece. I think this would also provide a really useful avenue for sound design to go down, taking small fragments of sounds that one may not find so readily in their hard drive that sound similar to a preselected file would solve the problem of finding a sound that’s good-but-not-quite-right, in layering a sound one would be able to have a much wider plethora of options to really fine tune the effect.