Granular material asteroids. Some examples of granular materials are snow, nuts, coal, sand, rice, coffee, corn flakes, fertilizer, and bearing balls. Research into granular materials is thus directly applicable and goes back at least to Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, whose law of friction was originally stated for granular materials. Granular materials are commercially important in applications as diverse as pharmaceutical industry, agriculture, and energy production. Powders are a special class of granular material due to their small particle size, which makes them more cohesive and more easily suspended in a gas. The soldier/physicist Brigadier Ralph Alger Bagnold was an early pioneer of the
Granular synthesis possible. Greek composer Iannis Xenakis is known as the inventor of the granular synthesis technique. Canadian composer Barry Truax was one of the first to implement real-time versions of this synthesis technique. "Granular synthesis has been implemented in different ways, notably by the Canadian composer Barry Truax." There are now many dedicated devices available for exploring granular synthesis without using a computer. Many of these devices are in the Eurorack modular synthesizer format, such as: Granular synthesis Granular synthesis is a basic sound synthesis method that operates on the microsound time scale. It is based on the same principle as