This piece is based upon Edvard Munch’s expressionist painting “The Scream” and related themes. The structural components at work rely on granular synthesis (imagined by physicist Dennis Gabor and first implemented by Iannis Xenakis) for sound generation, whereby many hundreds of sound samples, or grains, of 5 to 50 milliseconds in length are pulled from a source recording and played back amidst one another. The interaction of these individual grains may be likened to particles in physical matter, smearing together into a perceptually solid texture. Analogously, each sound particle is like a droplet of water in the company of countless others, grouping together to appear as a flowing river (Barry Truax).

The prevailing model for structuring the placement of these particles in space (stereoscopically) is a stochastic cloud. Particles within this piece are deliberately modeled as cells within a petri dish – they form colonies that grow from a central point, mutate, and die. Each one of these colonies has a unique DNA-like structure of parameters determining its sound that are identical among the grains within it – save those that mutate to another form.