The IRCAM concatenative real-time sound synthesis system CataRT plays grains from a large corpus of segmented and descriptor-analysed sounds according to proximity to a target position in the descriptor space. This can be seen as a content-based extension to granular synthesis providing direct access to specific sound characteristics.
CataRT is implemented in MaxMSP using the FTM and Gabor libraries. Segmentation and MPEG-7 descriptors are loaded from text or SDIF files, or analysed on-the-fly.
CataRT allows to explore the corpus interactively or via a target sequencer, to resynthesise an audio file or live input with the source sounds, or to experiment with expressive speech synthesis and gestural control.
CataRT is explained in more detail in this article and is an interactive implementation of the new concept of Corpus-Based Concatenative Synthesis.