Granular textures organise into three perceptual layers: points, lines, and clouds

Roads uses a three-tier taxonomy drawn from visual art to describe granular textures. A single grain produces a point — a momentary sonic pinprick. Grains lined up in pitch create a line, perceived as a sustained tone. Grains scattered loosely in pitch and time produce a cloud — an atmospheric, undifferentiated mass. This framework is compositionally generative: the same granular engine can produce all three simply by varying density and pitch distribution. His album Point Line Cloud is built entirely from these three materials.

Examples

Curtis Roads’ album Point Line Cloud uses only these three materials: slow, separated bursts (points); sustained single-frequency grain streams (lines); dense, pitch-scattered fields (clouds).

Assessment

Given a granular patch with grain density, pitch scatter, and duration controls, predict which of the three categories each parameter combination most likely produces, and design a patch for each.