A sophisticated form of additive synthesis, combining sound elements, called grains, which have a specific duration (typically 1-50ms), waveform, peak amplitude, and bell-curve amplitude envelopes. Hundreds or thousands of grains are combined per second to form an event. An event has such attributes as start time, duration, initial waveform, waveform slope, initial center frequency, frequency slope, bandwidth, bandwidth slope, initial grain density (number of grains per second), slope, initial amplitude, and amplitude slope. Essentially, a sound event is sliced into time screens that contain the amplitude and frequency dimensions of hundreds of events. These screens are assembled into books that define a complete sound object.