Mutable Instruments Beads Manual page 3

Beads in a nutshell
One way of picturing how Beads operates is to imagine a
tape loop, on which incoming audio is continuously recorded.
Every time you request a grain to be played (in reaction to
a trigger, a button press, periodically, or randomly), a new
replay head positions itself along the tape.
If this replay head doesn't move, the audio will be played
back at the original pitch and speed, but if it moves closer
to, or further away from the record head, the signal will be
replayed at a different speed and pitch. This replay head has
its own amplitude envelope, and it will leave the tape once
the envelope has reached a null amplitude.
Now imagine up to 30 replay heads flying along the tape.
Imagine you can stop the incoming audio from being record-
ed on the tape so that all these little replay heads can freely
move along and gather sounds. And there's a reverb...
Beads does not use tape, but RAM. In this manual we use
computer-science terminology and refer to this virtual
piece of tape as a recording buffer.