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Archives of the Eighth Nerve (Jan 2004 — Dec 2010)

Kyma Studio of the Month

See all of the studios of the month in the Studio of the Month archives.

Events

Canterbury, 21 Feb 2013 — Improvisation for trombone and Kyma. more...

, 20 Jul 2012 — Kyma Composers,

The deadline for the ‘Call for Works’ for the SoundProof? ensemble is just one week away (July 20), so there is still just time for you to finish that one-minute composition you’ve been contemplating all these years! We have already received several very interesting works, and so this performance set promises to be great fun. Please see the posted Call on the Vox Novus web site: (http://www.voxnovus.com/15_Minutes_of_Fame).

SoundProof? consists of Patricia Strange (violin), Stephen Ruppenthal (trumpets), and me (viola). We will select fifteen one-minute compositions from this Call, and assemble them into a single mega-composition to be performed without undue pause between individual works. We plan to take this ’15 Minutes of Fame’ set on tour with us this Autumn, including a performance at the 2012 Electronic Music Midwest festival. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the project or the ensemble (********). Thanks! more...

, 01 Jul 2012 — The performance ensemble SoundProof? (Patricia Strange, violin; Stephen Ruppenthal, trumpet & flugelhorn; Brian Belet, viola & live Kyma processing) is calling for new one-minute compositions written specifically for the ensemble for a ’15 Minutes of Fame’ concert set, to be performed during their Fall 2012 Midwest Tour (October 2012). Deadline for scores and Kyma TimeLines? is 1 July 2012. For more information, visit: http://www.voxnovus.com/15_Minutes_of_Fame more...

Breda, 16 Jun 2012 — Robert Jarvis' sound installation for an 'orchestra' of bats and accompanying 'choir' of bat detectors will be performed at the Wolfslaar nature reserve, outside Breda (The Netherlands) on Saturday 16th June as part of this year's "Interference Festival". The fun begins after sunset, as dusk falls and the bats come out to feed. As they fly around and make use of their biosonar radar capabilities in search of insects, Robert's installation picks up their signals and extrapolates the musical information contained therein to control a musical score. The result is an evocative surround sound musical experience as night falls, deepening each listener's relationship with the environment and creating a magical and memorable experience for all.

Some public responses:

"I couldn't believe that I was listening to real bats - what a variety of noises, and to see them in real time was an absolute knockout.  The whole thing was fantastic."

"I was enchanted by the bat chatter... what a genius idea, and so beautiful."

"This is the kind of music that makes people think and transforms their experience of bats, of humans, of sound, of communication.  This kind of transformative experience is the whole reason for art."

http://www.idfx.nl/nl/agenda/echolocation more...

Lisbon, 22 May 2012 — A special performance included in the "Reading D. Quixote" series features a live improvisation based on Carlos Alberto Augusto's specially designed Kyma sounds. These are triggered by actress/singer Teresa Albuquerque's voice singing and improvising over a poem at the end of Part 1 of the famous work by Cervantes. Choirs, clicks and spiral sounds, explode while Cardenio and D. Fernando fight for Luscinda's love... more...

Geneva, 14 Oct 2011 — An informal meetup of Kyma users and interested individuals, hosted by long-time user Cristian Vogel. Will form regularly. Coming soon to Berlin!

Drop an email to station55 at no-future.com

more...

Sittingbourne, Kent, 23-31 Jul 2011 — A new work by Robert Jarvis for Sittingbourne High Street, in Kent. Using a recent advance in music technology that allows shop windows to be used as audio sources capable of playing quiet sounds, the street will be transformed into a multi-channel sound installation for eight days at the end of July.

The sounds used in the installation represent the various traders along the street and to this end Robert has created a series of sonic vignettes drawn from sounds recorded in the various shops in collaboration with the retailers. As the installation plays through the daytime and early evening these small compositions will fade in and out from 26 resonating shop windows along the street surprising the passers-by and encouraging them to make new connections with their surroundings.... more...

Whitstable, 02 Jul 2011 — A day of improvised music and art featuring Aleks Kolkowski, Mat Manieri, Liam Noble, Evan Parker, Mark Sanders, Roger Turner and Matt Wright, and a new "proposition" for trombone and Kyma by Robert Jarvis. more...

Miami, 20-22 Jan 2011 — Film maker Theo Lipfert's Beneath the Surface (premiered in Vienna at KISS2010) has been selected for performance at SEAMUS in January 2011 in Miami. The film, featuring processed video taken from a camera that was thrown out into the ocean and gradually washed ashore by the waves, has a live-generated sound track consisting of crisply processed watery sounds recorded by the camera and randomly-selected, processed phrases of 13 year-olds recounting their vivid and sometimes disturbing dreams (beneath the surface in more ways than one!).

Shifting focus from beneath the surface to above the surface and on the rocks in San Francisco Bay, composer Brian Belet's 8-channel Sea Lions Mix has also been selected for performance SEAMUS 2011. Based on the processed cries of sea lions mixed with the voices of Belet's family, Sea Lions Mix is timbrally rich and sometimes comical. more...

New York, NY, 18 Jan 2011 — While studying at NYU, John Littig worked days as a research assistant in the brain imaging department at the New York State Psychiatric Institute while spending his evenings playing drums in jazz clubs from Greenwich Village to Harlem, often returning home after sunrise. Both influences are reflected in his latest work in which Kyma is used for creating atmospheric intros to sultry Brazilian-style vocals, rock, soul and R&B tunes. Kyma can be heard on the intro to Tomorrow Never Knows and to Inside All Around (follow the Music link). John Littig will be playing at SOB's (Sounds of Brazil) in New York on Tuesday, Jan. 18th with Onaje Allan Gumbs on keyboards, Paul Hemmings on guitar, and choreography and performance by Hettie Barnhill from the Broadway smash hit Fela. more...

Vienna, 13 Dec 2010 — On December 13 2010, Patrik Lechner performed live with Kyma and Jitter at the Ankerbrotfabrik performance space located in a former bread factory in the 10th district of Vienna. Here's a rehearsal for the live set of Side Draft and a photo from the concert. Lechner will be performing in Dubai in early 2011 (more details soon). more...

New York, 11 Dec 2010 — Listen to excerpts from Micah Frank's sonic mapping of taxi traffic density at New York City intersections on his website. To read more about how Frank uses Max to gather and process data and send it to Kyma to control synthesis parameters, read his article entitled Junction: Taxi Cabs Generate a Soundtrack in Real Time. more...

Lisbon, 10 Dec 2010 — João Carrilho (aka Jonas Runa) performed live with jazz drummer Eddie Prévost of AMM on December 10, 2010 at Culturgest in Lisbon as part of Zul Zelub, Carrilho's new project with partner pianist/musicologist Jorge Lima Barreto. Carrilho, currently completing the very first PhD in electronic music in Portugal, used Kyma (aka 'kima x') as part of the trio's radical conceptual approach, described as a 'cyber journey'. more...

Vienna, 03 Dec 2010 — Even if you couldn't make it to Vienna this year, you can still check out some of the talks, concerts, and presentations of KISS2010 through videos, sound recordings and photos of the Kyma International Sound Symposium. more...

Paris, 24 Nov 2010 — Camille Troillard's band Neïmo has been performing live with Kyma recently, for example on November 24, 2010 at La Flèche d'Or in Paris. more...

New York, 22 Nov 2010 — Joel Chadabe and Electronic Music Foundation held an informal opening of the EMF Creative Resource Center in New York City to give everyone a look at EMF's beautiful new recording studio, partake in a pre-holiday glass of wine, and learn about the opportunities offered by the EMF Creative Resource Center. The focus on Monday was an introduction to the Kyma System and how it can be used as a tool for sound design, post production, and electronic composition. more...

Murcia, 19 Nov 2010 — Miguel Gil Ruiz' Everybody has a dream was selected from over 340 submissions as a winner of the Second International Sound Art Competition, sponsored by Spain's Radio 3 and the Centro Parraga of Murcia, November 19 2010. The € 13,500 prize was presented during a special gala event. Described by the composer as 'an ode against xenophobia' with 95% created in Kyma, Everybody has a dream features Martin Luther King "singing" an Adhan call to prayer and Nicolas Sarkozy monotonizing a gypsy tune. It's one of the most creative and meaningful applications of 'auto tuning' ever. more...

's-Hertogenbosch, 10-14 Nov 2010 — Kees Tazelaar was part of the November Music Festival, Den Bosch: The music of today by the makers of today. A special element introduced this year was the Cineac Sonorous, a room with a special 8-speaker immersion set up. In 1993, and later in 1995, Tazealar studied the potential of GM Koenig's program Projekt. Recently he found the DAT tapes of those experiments and took one of these recordings as a starting point for sonic transformations in Kyma. He combined the transformed results with the original material, and shifted the transformations of each group forward and backward in time, thus creating a kind of canonical network of 9 quadraphonic layers. The resulting composition is called Projection (2009). more...

Milan, 28-29 Oct 2010 — USO Project's Empty Rooms creates a self-organizing link between sound and visuals when a video camera "observes" a movie and a microphone "listens" to the space. The Kyma sound design environment (accelerated by the Pacarana sound computation engine) computes the data and performs real-time evaluations between the different types of numerical information (audio-video), producing a "sonorous response" to the asynchronous stream of audio-visual content. The synthesized information is then diffused in the performance space again through 4 loudspeakers. more...

Beijing, 27 Oct 2010 — On October 27, 2010, Samuel Pellman presented three of his Kyma pieces at the Music Acoustica Festival at the Central Conservatory in Beijing. Pellman's collaborations with film maker Miranda Raimondi are inspired by humankind's initial forays into space exploration. more...

Sydney, 15-16 Oct 2010 — Garth Paine was one of the organizers of SEAM 2010, a two day Symposium (15 and 16 October 2010) at the Seymour Centre in Sydney. The focus of the symposium was on Embodiment in Digitally Mediated Environments and included public talks and artist performances/presentations by local and international Artists, including a showing of Stelarc's Articulated Head and an evening with one of Australia's leading dance companies, Chunky Move, performing GLOW, a work where the dancers manipulate and play with projected light in real time. Symposium attendees were also invited to experience Garth Paine's WiiMirror, an interaction-experiment in which two people stand back-to-back and attempt to synchronize the movement of their hand-held Wiimote controllers, guided only by sound. more...

Geneva, 29 Sep 2010 — The Cie Gilles Jobin organized a workshop on sound for dance, including a demonstration of the Kyma system, led by its creators Carla Scaletti and Kurt Hebel.  Cristian Vogel, Musical Director of the Cie Gilles Jobin performed an excerpt from one of his Kyma collaborations with choreographer Gilles Jobin and discussed his approach to finding the structure of an entire composition in the microstructure of a single found sound. Some excerpts from the presentations and the ensuing discussion among all the participants on live vs recorded performance, virtuosity in the age of digital instruments, and the direct-brain interface can be viewed on Gilles Jobin's site. more...

München, 25 Sep 2010 — Mathis Nitschke's "anthropogenically disturbed growth area" is a declaration of love to Argentinian Tango from the point of view of his roots in European art and pop music. It is a chamber music cycle with Mathis on electronics, consisting of 14 parts, part 10 "jünger" is an improvisation on a poem by Ulrike Draesner. more...

Vienna, 24-26 Sep 2010 — Check out the preliminary program for the Kyma International Sound Symposium at http://www.tonsalon.at/KISS2010/index.php/program/schedule. If it sounds interesting, please join the fun by registering here: http://www.tonsalon.at/KISS2010/index.php/registration/registrationform more...

Olomouc, 20 Sep 2010 — Michael Wittgraf and Scott Miller performed live with Kyma at Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic on September 20, 2010, with Wittgraf on piano and microphone and Miller using Nintendo Wii controllers. more...

Vienna, 09 Sep 2010 — On September 9, 2010 at The Vienna Concert House, Wolfgang Mitterer performed his piece 15 minutes for 13 morphs with the Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto conducted by Christoph König, and with the composer on organ and Kyma. He shared the program with Daniel Moreira and Gustav Mahler! (Symphony Nr 1). more...

Vienna, 30 Aug 2010 — The registration deadline for KISS2010 is fast approaching! The Kyma International Sound Symposium is a place to share your ideas, experiences and results with fellow Kyma practitioners in a relaxed, fun, and stimulating environment; KISS2010 will be three days packed with music, technology, philosophical discussions, and Kyma master classes. Commenting on last year's symposium, Federico Placidi and Matteo Milani wrote: The lectures performed during these 2 days taught us something: regardless of their own personal skills, and of their own degree of Kyma knowledge, observing things from other users' point of view reveals unexpected surprises and creates new connections, on a mental and operational level, which were never considered before. You can read their full report (with photos) on the Unidentified Sound Object blog and an additional slideshow.

This year's symposium is scheduled for 24-26 September 2010 in the newly renovated Casino Baumgarten ballroom and the Rhiz Bar Modern in Vienna, Austria. Whether you are a Kyma expert, a Kyma beginner, or just Kyma-curious, you are cordially invited to join us for three days of learning, sharing, meeting, and fun!  Here's a direct link to the registration form: http://tonsalon.at/KISS2010/index.php?option=com_civicrm&task=civicrm/event/register&id=1&reset=1 more...

Berlin, 13 Aug 2010 — RetroInterrupt is the name for Cristian Vogel's most recent audio/video project, in which he controls his Kyma NeverEngine at the pixel level by way of his own animated graphic interfaces created in Processing. He performed on the 13th of August 2010 at the Krake Festival for Experimental Dance Music in Berlin and on the 20th of August 2010 at Elektronisk Jazz Juice in Aarhus. more...

Brooklyn, NY, 11 Aug 2010 — Micah Frank is using Max and Kyma in his Tectonic installation. Whenever an earthquake is detected anywhere in the world, Max sends the data to Kyma where it controls granular synthesis, waveshaping, subtractive synthesis, or physical modeling. The longitude and latitude of the quake is encoded as position in a speaker array. more...

Berlin, 29 Jul 2010 — Richard Barrett used Kyma on an 8-channel fixed media piece entitled "SIMORGH" for a concert in Berlin that was part of the INVENTIONEN 2010 festival. Since he had only two weeks in which to both learn Kyma and compose the music, Richard says that this first piece was just scratching the surface of Kyma, but that "there's always something inspiring about such high-pressure situations." He's looking forward to integrating Kyma into his live performance setup for his next piece. Visit the Festival site and click on "Konzerte" at upper left, and then scroll down to find Richard. more...

Eugene, 19 Jul 2010 — At the University of Oregon, in July 2010, Jeffrey Stolet taught a two-week intensive course in electro-acoustic music centered on Kyma for a group of students from the Central Conservatory in Beijing. Their professors from the conservatory reported back that the students were inspired by the course and by how hard Professor Stolet and his graduate assistants made everyone work. Both the students and the professors named the Summer Academy a big success! more...

London, 08 Jul 2010 — Composer Robert Jarvis' proposal Around North is a finalist for the controversial PRS New Music Award, a prize that encourages creators to "push the boundaries of their artistic practice." extend "the possibilities of music," and seeks to stimulate debate on the question: what is music? Robert's proposal is, in a sense, a 21st century music of the spheres (he consulted with fellow Kyma-ist and physicist David McClain to confirm the accuracy of the equations). You can hear more about the piece (and vote for it!) by visiting the Foundation website above. Voting ends at midnight, Sunday, 5th September, 2010. more...

Water Mill, NY, 05 Jul 2010 — Leonardo Gala is currently researching composers of electronic music from Latin America for a new book to be published within the next two years. He is seeking biographical and contact information from any composers who are utilizing Symbolic Sound products. This work will cover the years from 1975 - 2010 and will include education, equipment usage, and recording studio use, performance formats, recordings and scores, where available. Please contact galadotcom7@gmail.com (or by mail at: PO Box 888 Water Mill NY 11976) more...

Athens, OH, 02 Jul 2010 — Mark Phillips forwarded some photos of a pet capybara with size comparison to a guinea pig (no pacas or pacaranas though). more...

Oakland, 21 Jun 2010 — Silvia Matheus and Thomas Miley were featured in this year's time-honored summer solstice event: "Garden of Memory". The venue is a labyrinth, Julia Morgan-designed columbarium, and mausoleum replete with gardens, fountains, and stained-glass skylights. The concert, described by the San Francisco Chronicle as "a walk-through fun house of musical and visual splendor," also featured Bay area composers and performers Pamela Z, Amy X Neuburg, Ellen Fullman & Theresa Wong, Fred Frith, Beth Custer, Gyan Riley, the William Winant Percussion Ensemble, Sarah Cahill, Ken Ueno, Paul Dresher and Joel Davel, Kitka, the Cardew Choir, Adam Fong, Maggi Payne, Monique Buzzarte, Luciano Chessa, Dan Plonsey's Daniel Popsicle, Krys Bobrowski Wobbly, and others. Silvia got a special mention in this review and a description of a spontaneous improvisation with concert-goers in the last paragraph of this blog entry. more...

Portsmouth PO1 3BF, 17 June - 1 August 2010 — KEYBIRD (2006) - an interactive installation comprising of a musical keyboard that plays birdsong - is an invited work at the Aspex Gallery's "The Great Outdoors" exhibition.

The Keybird emits a different bird call for every note that is pressed, allowing players to contrast and compare the different songs, and allowing them to compose imaginary dawn choruses. By interacting with the work, players are encouraged to move between the role of observer, as they identify the different species through their different musical signatures, and that of composer as they treat the calls as musical phrases in their own right.

The installation aims to create for its users a lighthearted yet deep connection with bird song in general, and by extension the soundscape. As the Keybird notes are physically played a mental connection with the sound is made with the result that sounds are subconsciously ‘lodged’ in short-term memory, and listening is heightened, at least for a short while. The installation gives time to its players to enquire, to play and to share the sounds, preparing the mind for an enhanced listening experience. Players of Keybird notice that they will begin to hear the detail in the different bird calls as well as hear sounds they never heard before, and the world will never quite sound the same to them again.

The birdsong featured is taken from the observational notes made by a Rye Harbour RSPB Warden over the course of one bird-watching year, and so is representative of the range of birds that can be found in the South of England. The calls of 76 different birds are arranged in alphabetical order along the keyboard and the visitor is left to experiment with playing the different notes, to contrast and compare and to compose their own compositions. more...

Los Angeles, 08 Jun 2010 — Francois Blaignan has won an AICP Award (Association of Independent Commercial Producers) for Sound Design on Bill Bruce's 60 second AMP energy drink ad, Tune Out.

Blaignan also used Kyma in collaboration with Claude Letessier and Radical Friend to generate sounds for The Unveiling of the Digital Flesh, a live hologram installation performed as part of the Creators Project in Beijing. more...

Standon Lane, Ockley, Surrey RH5 5QR, 01 May 2010 — Situated in a secluded part of the Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden, Robert Jarvis' gr0w sound installation takes its inspiration from the genetic makeup of the surrounding plants growing nearby. The music was composed entirely in Kyma, utilising Harm Visser's physical modelling toolkit, as well as advice and input from the Kyma community.

Visitors to the garden hear fast moving but gentle musical patterns derived from the plants' DNA mixed with contrasting slower melodies based on different amino acid sequences governing the processes of growth and aging. The sounds slowly fade in, teasing the ears with their presence, and quietly dance around the pond before fading out again returning the listener to the garden's gentle soundscape. The genetically inspired compositions add a subtle presence to the surroundings - not in competition with the garden's natural soundscape, but complementing it: hinting at the unseen processes connected with the plants' growth. The result is an experience that connects the listener to the hidden but ever present micro-world of genetic activity and the underlying processes of life itself.

more...

San Jose, 20 Apr 2010 — The annual spring concert at San Jose State University featured performances of Scott Miller's 'Fun House' for bass clarinet and Kyma, Allen Strange's 'Misty Magic Land,' realized from the composer's notes by Brian Belet, and Belet's '(Disturbed) Radiance' for piano and Kyma, performed by Janis Mercer. more...

Eugene, 27 Feb 2010 — In JiaJie, composer Chi Iris Wang (studying composition with Jeffrey Stolet) uses a Wacom tablet and Kyma to create an 8-channel sound experience. Using the 'pen' end to control the spatial location of the sound and the 'eraser' end to trigger different scenes, Chang evokes the sense of nostalgia for far-away loved ones that is especially poignant on holidays. more...

Armagh, 16 Apr - 15 May 2010 — Building on his previous work in investigating different soundscapes, Robert Jarvis' latest sound installation is inspired by the City of Armagh, in Northern Ireland. Entitled, Armaghoclock, the work takes the form of a virtual timepiece utilising the whole of the Main Gallery space, and playing a different sound recorded from around the City every minute. With the aid of twelve loudspeakers positioned around the gallery in similar manner to the numbers around the circumference of a clock face, each of the sounds pans around the gallery space imitating the sweep of a clock’s second hand. The recordings range from the intimate to the well-known: from church bells to the pet shop's talking cockatoo - from pre-natal ultrasound to grave digging - referencing local trades, leisure and nature. Together, they combine to give their own account of the City’s identity, the people within it, and our changing soundscape. more...

Lisbon, 15 Apr 2010 — 25 Years/ 50 Composers/ 100 Minutes more...

Saint Cloud, Minnesota, 11 Apr 2010 — Many of us had the pleasure of meeting or renewing our connections with composer James Brody during the April SEAMUS Kyma workshop, only to be shocked and saddened by the news that James and his friend, composer Franz Kamin were killed in a car accident in Roseville, Minnesota the day after the conference. During SEAMUS several of us had been in the middle of an ongoing discussion with James on complexity theory, bird songs, random number generators and The Taos Hum. Yes, he had heard it, but he explained that it is not just in Taos where you can hear it: The Hum. James had been enthusiastically involved in organizing a music & complexity series at The Complex in Santa Fe . If you would like to honor a colleague while, at the same time supporting an organization dedicated to the connections between complexity, science, and the arts, please visit this site, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click the James Brody Memorial Fund for art & performance. Good bye, James. We salute a fellow explorer of the interface between sound and science! more...

St. Cloud, 07 Apr 2010 — Curious to learn more about Kyma? Carla Scaletti will present a full-day Kyma master class on Wednesday April 7 2010, in conjunction with the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the US (SEAMUS) national conference in St. Cloud, Minnesota. The course is free with conference registration.

If you'd like to participate in the master class and are unable to attend the conference itself, please send email to Symbolic Sound to reserve a place: info-kyma@symbolicsound.com. The SEAMUS conference is 3 solid days and nights of electronic music concerts and presentations (including several live Kyma/Paca(rana) performances). more...

Margate, 02 - 20 Apr 2010 — Recently nominated for the British Composer Awards, Robert Jarvis’ insect inspired surround sound installation, ENTOMOPHONIX is to be featured as part of "Insect World" - a themed exhibition for the newly opened Marine Studios, in Margate, Kent, UK.

The soundwork was originally created as part of a residency at La Cité des Insectes during the summer of 2007, and is also featured as a permanent sound installation there.

To create the composition, Robert set about the challenging task of recording the sounds of the various insects that inhabit the museum’s grounds. This took some time! Of particular interest were those nuances of sound inherent in the various insect calls that we almost never hear, and yet must be there for a reason. He was also interested in what could be learnt about sonic communication from studying these sounds and what implications there might be in relation to his work as a composer. After devising various methods for recording the different sounds (how to record an ants’ nest, for example, or a fly cleaning its wings) the sounds were then edited into a useable palette for musical composition and the piece was created. His aim was to create something that would allow the listener access to the unique sound world of these small creatures, allowing the listener to imagine life through the ears of an insect.

Whilst creating Entomophonix Robert also kept a weblog of his discoveries and thoughts and this can be seen at www.entomophonix.wordpress.com more...

Dresden, 26 Mar 2010 — Sarth Calhoun performed Kyma and Continuum with Lucibel Crater at the Jazzwelten Festival in Dresden on 26 March and as one third of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Trio during their April 2010 UK & European Tour, and May concerts in Sydney, Australia. more...

Eugene, 27 Feb 2010 — Several new works for Kyma performed live from a Wacom tablet were premiered at a Future Music Oregon concert in February 2010. Chi Wang, Kevin Drake, Jon Bellona, and Jenifer Jaseau, graduate students of composer Jeffrey Stolet, performed the new pieces live at the Thelma Schnitzer Hall at the University of Oregon School of Music. more...

Faversham, 06 Feb 2010 — Sometimes, it's nice to be reminded that not all sounds and sequences are generated electronically. In this video clip, Robert Jarvis joins his neighbors, singer Chris Wood and inventor/music saw virtuoso Henry Dagg for a bit of mechanical sequencing and breath-powered signal generation. more...

Geneva, 28 Jan 2010 — Swiss television presented a 28 minute HD documentary on choreographer Gilles Jobin's new dance work, Black Swan, with particular emphasis on his collaboration with composer Cristian Vogel. The documentary illustrates the ways in which choreographer, composer, and dancers collaborate throughout the development of the work, and includes some close-up shots of Cristian's Virtual Control Surface as well as excerpts from the dance from initial explorations, to rehearsals, to the premiere performance. more...

Dallas, 15 Jan 2010 — Austin-based composer William H. Meadows utilized OSCulator to connect multiple Nintendo Wiimotes to Kyma for a 15 January 2010 performance of The Butterfly Effect and Other Beautiful Catastrophes at The Center for Creative Connections at the Dallas Museum of Art. Meadows, in collaboration with choreographer Kerry Kreiman and members of the CD/FW dance company, used the Wiimotes to transform dancers' movements into controllers for sounds being generated live in Kyma to highlight the interplay between the physical and virtual worlds. Each performance of the piece is unique, the structure being based on concepts from chaos and catastrophe theory. A reviewer for the Fort Worth Star Telegram described the premiere: ...a fascinating kaleidoscope of sound and movement... It was a strange and wonderful scene. For more details, see Pegasus News. more...

Rome, 10 Jan 2010 — Each semester, Federico Placidi teaches a 20-hour module on Sound Design Sculpting in Kyma as part of the Electronic Music course at the Istituto Italiano per le Tecnologie Musicale in Rome. more...

Bourges, 08 Jan 2010 — Scott Miller's Nebe na Zemi (Heaven on Earth) was selected for the 36th Bourges International Competitions Electroacoustic Music and Electronic Art 2009 Competition in the Quadrivium - 6th category: work for installation or environment. According to Miller: "I quite literally couldn't have done it without Kyma!" Miller is working with long-time collaborator Pat O'Keefe preparing to record a new CD featuring works for clarinet, bass clarinet, interactive electronics, and improvisation. more...

Torino, 03 Dec 2009 — Composer Federico Placidi's new work Solo for Clarinet in B flat, Cello and Live Electronics and Kyma was premiered in Torino in December, 2009. Fiarì Ensemble organizes a contemporary music series of concerts, In scena, in Turin. The last concert of the festival, Call for Scores, combines electronic processing of sound to the ductility of the Fiarì Ensemble. Placidi performed the live processing and Matteo Milani did the sound diffusion using a Jazz Mutant Lemur tablet. more...

London, 01 Dec 2009 — ENTOMOPHONIX – Robert Jarvis’s sound installation for La Cité des Insectes, in Chaud, France, has been selected as one of two finalists for this year’s British Composer Awards in their Sonic Art category. The awards will be announced at a special event at the Law Society in London on Tuesday 1st December, and will be broadcast the following evening on BBC Radio 3 from 7pm.

The surround sound composition was originally created as part of a residency at La Cité des Insectes during the summer of 2007, and is now featured as a permanent sound installation there.

To create the composition, Robert first of all set about the challenging task of recording the sounds of the various insects that inhabit the museum’s grounds. This took some time! Of particular interest were those nuances of sound inherent in the various insect calls that we almost never hear, and yet must be there for a reason. He was also interested in what could be learnt about sonic communication from studying these sounds and what implications there might be in relation to his work as a composer. After devising various methods for recording the different sounds (how to record an ants’ nest, for example, or a fly cleaning its wings) the sounds were then edited into a useable palette for musical composition and the piece was created. His aim was to create something that would allow the listener access to the unique sound world of these small creatures, allowing the listener to imagine life through the ears of an insect.

Whilst creating Entomophonix Robert also kept a weblog of his discoveries and thoughts and this can be seen at www.entomophonix.wordpress.com

Nominations for all thirteen categories of the awards can be seen at: www.britishcomposerawards.com . more...

Como, 18 Nov 2009 — Composer Agostino Di Scipio presented a 3-day workshop in Como, Italy (near the Swiss border) with students and professors from the local conservatory. During the final concert, they performed Audible Ecosystemics n.2a (Feedback Study) and n.3a (Background Noise Study), Texture/Multiple (with 5 instruments & electronics), and 6 Studi (for piano & electronics). more...

Oxfordshire, 01 Nov 2009 — Robert Jarvis' latest composition is a soundscape work for BBC Radio Oxford, taking its inspiration as well as all of its material from recordings made within the county over the last six months - notably using those sounds that are in someway defining of place and contribute to the county's aural heritage.

Since April, Robert has been working with the BBC, its listeners and diverse communities around the County collecting people's favourite sounds as well as their stories, and these have been featured on radio, television and online. The resulting work will be broadcast on 1st November at 9pm as part of an hour's programme focusing on the process that led to the piece's creation and will be able to be listened to within Oxfordshire on 95.2FM, on the BBC Oxford website (www.bbc.co.uk/oxford) and also on the BBC's 'Listen Again' service for up to seven days after the broadcast. more...

Mannheim, 24 Oct 2009 — A schedule of live performances of pieces from Ambrose Field's album Being Dufay is available on the album's website. You can read more about his use of Kyma on the album here. more...

Oneonta, New York, 20 Oct 2009 — On October 20, 2009, composer Scott Miller was inducted into the Music Hall of Fame and received an alumni achievement award from his undergraduate alma mater, SUNY-Oneonta. On the first evening, Miller presented a concert of Kyma-based interactive music (composed and structured improvisations) with clarinetist Calvin Falwell and trumpeter Ben Aldridge and, on the second night, he participated in a concert with atom3, an electroacoustic improv group. He also presented lectures at SUNY-Oneonta and Hartwick College on his music—including a lecture entitled Collaboration as Concept. According to Scott, now that he has a Paca, this was the first time he was able to bring his Kyma rig as carry-on luggage. Everything, including his laptop, fit in a Hardigg Storm iM2500 case. more...

Limoges, 16 Oct - 21 Nov 2009 (except Sundays) — Robert Jarvis' insect inspired sound installation is currently featured as part of Patrick Bleuzen's "Des Insectes et des Hommes" exhibition, on show at Espace Noriac in Limoges France.

Imagine a room full of butterflies… Imagine living in a beehive or an ants’ nest… Imagine going for a ride on a back of a dragonfly… what would that sound like? Entomophonix allows the listener access to this unique sound world and to imagine life through the ears of an insect.... more...

Oslo, 10 Oct 2009 — New contemporary dance performance with electronic music composed by Petter Wiik, who has utilized his Paca for around 50 % of the audio (durata: 50 min.). Wiik uses Live/Kore 2/Novation 61 SL during the show. more...

Barcelona, 08-10 Oct 2009 — The First International Kyma Symposium is scheduled for 8-10 October 2009 in the vibrant Poble Nou neighborhood of Barcelona during the annual LEM festival. The preliminary program includes master classes presented by the creators of Kyma, papers and demos presented by Kyma practitioners, and a program of concerts, live improvised silent film scores, and culminating with Saturday night/Sunday morning dancing at the Moog to Cristian Vogel's live Kyma set. You are invited to learn, to share, to meet, and to enjoy!

For up-to-the-minute information on schedules, maps, accommodations, travel, and discussions, please join the Erutufon Forum (there is no cost to join the forum).

Symposium Program

Register for Symposium

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Barcelona, 07 Oct 2009 — Cristian Vogel provided interactive sound for the October 7, 2009 opening of Used Abused and Amused by Santiago Taccetti and Natalia Ibanez Lario at the TWAIN (totally without an interesting name) gallery in Barcelona. Vogel placed contact mics on black-painted papier-mâché balls suspended from orange cables in the gallery such that, when gallery visitors hit the sculpture, it triggered a grain cloud explosion in Kyma. In this video, you can see enthusiastic gallery visitors happily kicking, punching, and swinging the ersatz piñatas to be showered with chalk, glitter, and glass beads (and in the background you can catch glimpses of Cristian Vogel, Kyma, Kurt Hebel, and Carla Scaletti who were in Barcelona for the Kyma symposium which started later that week. more...

York, 29 Sep 2009 — TaylorDeupree was invited to do a residency with the New Aesthetics in Computer Music research project at The University Of York. Taylor was invited to create a new piece for Kyma-processed gamelan and to hold interviews and discussions on his role in the emergence of the microsound movement. more...

Atlanta, 27 Sep 2009 — The Hassler-Robinson duo (Don Hassler and Dick Robinson) performed a live, free electronic improvisation on September 27, 2009 from 7-8 PM at the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Hassler performed on the Buchla 200-E modular electronic music instrument, and Robinson's instrument was the Kyma/Pacarana. The concert was part of a month-long fundraising Arts Festival at the Atlanta Soto Zen Center, including a performance by the Hallucination Sextet: Dick Robinson, Jerry Cullum, and four virtual performers. more...

Tel Aviv, 25 Sep 2009 — Avi Benjamin and Michael Vaisburd presented their new collaboration project, 'AVI Channel', on September 25, 2009 in Tel Aviv. Envisioned as "sound tracks from imaginary films", AVI Channel embodies the artistic partners' energetic embrace of all music and sound genres, from classical to rock to jazz to electronic, to opera, to world music, live voice-processing, and even cuckoo clocks. Beethoven is a trope on a Beethoven piano sonata evoking Berio's Sinfonia in the logic and richness of its overlays of textures and styles. Did you ever have the feeling? is at various points lively, humorous, wild, and zen. Seated in a cabaret setting, the audience is treated to an energetic spectacle including a full-sized Continuum controlling Pacarana aggregate and additive synthesis, a couple of electronic keyboards, a grand piano, "virtual" performers appearing iChat-like on laptop screens and a trumpet player placed in the audience. Benjamin and Vaisburd are, respectively, musical director and sound designer for the Gesher Theatre, and their sense for staging and drama, along with Benjamin's training as a classical pianist and composer are very much in evidence. The audience responded enthusiastically and is now primed and ready for the next installment in this ongoing project. more...

Ottawa, 28-30 Aug 2009 — TangLed LYSerGic PuddLEs oN CeLEstiAL thReads aka Adam Sobel can be seen using his Kyma/Pacarana system in his live set at Anishnabe Festival in Ottawa Canada: http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewImage&friendID=312639020&albumID=259134&imageID=12263401 more...

Gothenburg, 12 Aug 2009 — On the 12th of August 2009, composer/organist Franz Danksagmüller will be performing his Kyma live to create an improvised score for Fritz Lang's silent science fiction masterpiece Metropolis as part of the Göteborg International Film Festival. The performance starts at 21:30 in the Movietheater ROY (Kungsportsavenyn 45). more...

Chicago, 09 Aug 2009 — Sarth Calhoun is currently touring in Europe with Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, and Sarth's Kyma system this summer (for upcoming dates, visit http://www.loureed.com and click the Blue Banner). In August, Sarth will be joining Lou Reed and his band at Lollapalooza in Chicago. more...

Eugene, OR, 28 Jul 2009 — Conductor/composer Robert Ponto used Kyma to reconstruct a performance of Stockhausen's SOLO (originally done with analog delays). Brian McWhorter is the soloist. more...

Grand Forks, ND, 13 Jul 2009 — Composer Michael Wittgraf has been awarded a Dakota Creative Connections grant in support of his work on a new quadraphonic work for 60-voice choir and Kyma. more...

Salzau, 04 Jul 2009 — Stanley Cowell, pianist/composer, has been using Kyma live on tour with Nasheet Waits' quartet, Equality in performances at Jazz Baltica festival in Salzau, Germany July 4th, 2009, on German Radio and 3SAT broadcasts, and at Club Mix, Jazz à Vienne (France) Festival, July 6th, 2009. more...

Margate, 27 Jun 2009 — (not exactly new, but still going strong...)

KEYBIRD (2006) is an interactive installation comprising of a musical keyboard that instead of playing musical notes, has a different birdsong on every key. Visitors see the musical keyboard and are drawn to playing some of the notes. After a brief moment of surprise and puzzlement, whilst the connection is made with the birdsong that results from the pressing of the keys, an exploration of the instrument ensues. As players contrast and compare the different calls and compose imaginary dawn choruses, they move between the roles of observer, as they identify the different species through their different musical signatures, and that of composer as they treat the calls as musical phrases in their own right.

The installation aims to create for its users a lighthearted yet deep connection with bird song in general, and by extension the soundscape. As the Keybird notes are physically played a mental connection with the sound is made, with the result that sounds are subconsciously ‘lodged’ in short-term memory, with the effect that listening is heightened, at least for a short while. The installation gives time to its players to enquire, to play and to share the sounds, preparing the mind for an enhanced listening experience. Players of Keybird notice that they will begin to hear the detail in the different bird calls as well as hear sounds they never heard before, and the world will never quite sound the same to them again.

The birdsong featured is taken from the observational notes made by a Rye Harbour RSPB Warden over the course of one bird-watching year, and so is representative of the range of birds that can be found in the South of England. The calls of 76 different birds are arranged in alphabetical order along the keyboard and the visitor is left to experiment with playing the different notes, to contrast and compare and to compose their own compositions. more...

Paris, 26 Jun 2009 — Camille Troillard introduced his Kyma/Pacarana rig into a Neïmo live show for the first time during their June 2009 performance at the largest school gala in France: the École Polytechnique's Gala. It was a memorable performance, and not just because of the Kyma vocalizations; halfway through the show, Neïmo's drummer Vincent Girault broke the head of the bass drum and the audience filled in by clapping until he could patch it with gaffer's tape. Here is some video from Neïmo's performance at Solidays in Paris on the 26th of June as part of an anti AIDS music festival. more...

NYC, 20 Jun 2009 — On Saturday, June 20, at 9PM EDT (Sunday, June 21, 1AM GMT) Richard Lainhart joined 23 other performers from seven countries on electro-music.com's Summer Solstice 09 Online Streaming Concert. To mark the solstice, Lainhart performed a live, hour-long set of One Sound: music for electric guitar and lapsteel processed through the Kyma CrossFilter. For more information, please visit the event's web page. more...

Darlington, Maryland, 11-14 Jun 2009 — Tangled Lysergic Puddles On Celestial Threads, the streaming psychic presentation of producer Adam Sobel, used Kyma to generate live organic beats, ripping blissful bass, auditory illusions, and sacred sounds for the 8th Annual GAIAN MIND SUMMER FESTIVAL June 11th through June 14th, 2009 at Ramblewood in Darlington, Maryland. The GAIAN MIND SUMMER FESTIVAL is the longest-running Psytrance Festival in the US and draws hundreds of dancers from around the world. Adam has also been busy in recording sessions, including a track called Breaking Gravity for Mind Warp Records' Mind Over Reality compilation. more...

Grinton, North Yorkshire, 25 May 2009 — Robert Jarvis' Echolocation installation will be featured at this year's Swaledale Festival in Yorkshire, England on Spring Bank Holiday in May.

On this occasion the installation will be set up around St Andrew's Church in the village of Grinton, in the Yorkshire Dales, UK.

As the bats come into the graveyard(!) to feed at around 10pm, Robert's installation will pick up their ultrasonic biosonar calls and, with the help of Kyma, utilise the inherent frequency, amplitude and bandwidth information to control an algorithimic score.

Visitors to the installation will be treated to a surround sound experience where they can listen to Robert's interpretation of the bats' ultrasonic activity at the same time as seeing the bats flitter in and out of strategically placed beams of light.

more...

(near) Oxford, 08 -09 May 2009 — For two special evenings this May, sound artist Robert Jarvis will take over Chimney Meadows nature reserve, in Oxfordshire, and turn it into a night-time sonic experience.

The event is presented in collaboration with Oxford Contemporary Music and the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust and builds on one of the most popular installations at last September's 'Magic Hour' at Oxford Botanic Garden.

As well as sound works inspired by the nocturnal wildlife at the Reserve there will also be activities, such as moth trapping, arranged by the Reserve itself, creating a complete experience for all those who attend.

The highlight of the evening will be the latest version of Robert's Echolocation sound installation. As the Bats come out to search for food and feed along the Reserve's canal they will emit their radar sounds. Using a series of strategically placed bat detectors, Robert's installation transforms these signals into an evocative surround sound musical experience as night falls.

Come and enjoy this extraordinary musical experience celebrating this often unheard wonder of nature.

Please note: The event will involve some walking around the nature reserve on easy tracks, with the installation taking place 2km (30 minutes on foot) from the car park, alongside the River Thames. Please wear clothes and footwear suitable for a countryside walk and possible wet weather. Bring a torch! The site is wheelchair accessible. more...

New York, 02 May 2009 — Phil Curtis performed live electronics using Kyma for Anne LeBaron's opera Crescent City with the New York City Opera at the Vox 2009 Festival, at 3:30 pm on May 2nd at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at NYU. In a mythical city between two hurricanes, will the Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau and two lone cops (one of them a ghost) be able to save the city from the storm, the anarchic Revelers, the roving ghosts of murderers, and five ambivalent Loa summoned by Marie? Phil Curtis (referred to as "the laptop player" can be seen briefly in the video on this page generating what LeBaron calls "atmospheric electronica" to give the orchestra an "otherworldly sound". more...

OXFORDSHIRE, 23 Apr - 25 Oct 2009 — Sounds of Oxfordshire - a six month project bringing together sound artist Robert Jarvis, BBC Radio Oxford and Oxford Contemporary Music and the people of Oxfordshire.

Between April and October Robert will work with the BBC and its listeners to collect people’s favourite, most meaningful, or characterful sounds that somehow help define their county of Oxfordshire. Through an extensive outreach programme, people of all ages will be encouraged to submit descriptions of sounds that they find particularly appealing, perhaps because the sounds are special to an area, or defining of a particular time, or maybe because they are disliked, or in danger of disappearing. The sounds and the stories connected with them will be broadcast on radio, TV and online and eventually incorporated into a Kyma created score for radio broadcast, CD release, and a touring installation. more...

New York, NY, 23-24 Apr 2009 — Metal Machine Trio presents a night of deep noise featuring Lou Reed on guitar, Ulrich Krieger on tenor sax, and Sarth Calhoun on Continuum fingerboard controlling live Kyma electronics. From an LA Times review of the trio's performance last year at Red Cat: Calhoun, using a laptop, a keyboard and a sort of electronic slide instrument called a Haken Continuum Fretboard, added gut-shaking low notes, distortion and drone to the mix. Krieger responded aggressively, and Reed seemed to draw in the energy. Performances are at 8:30 pm Thursday and Friday 23-24 April 2009 at The Gramercy Theatre in New York, NY. No songs, no vocals, all deep noise! Tickets available at: http://www.livenation.com/edp/eventId/405388 more...

Brooklyn, NY, 21 Apr 2009 — Carla Scaletti will present a Composers' Forum lecture/demonstration on Using Kyma for Live Performance and Music Composition at Brooklyn College, Brooklyn Conservatory of Music on the 21st of April 2009, 12:30 to 2:00 pm, in Room 251 of The Gershwin Building. For more information, please send email to info-kyma@symbolicsound.com. more...

New York, NY, 20 Apr 2009 — Kurt Hebel and Carla Scaletti will be at Electronic Music Foundation's midtown Manhattan studio on Monday the 20th of April to give demonstrations of Kyma and the new Pacarana hardware. Prospective or current Kyma users who are interested in learning more about Kyma and seeing it in action, please send email to info-kyma@symbolicsound.com. (This event is free but space is quite limited so a reservation is required, thanks!) more...

Annecy, 21-23 Apr 2009 — Currently rehearsing in his studios in Geneva, choreographer Gilles Jobin will premiere his new creation BLACK SWAN with original music by Cristian Vogel in Bonlieu Scène nationale, Annecy (France) on the following dates:

Tuesday 21 April, 8.30 pm

Wednesday 22 April, 8.30 pm

Thursday 23 April, 8.30 pm

For more information on the tour , please visit: http://www.bonlieu-annecy.com/detail?date=042009&event=547/ more...

Brooklyn, NY, 16-19 Apr 2009 — Nearly Ninety, a new work composed by John Paul Jones in collaboration with Sonic Youth and mixed-media sound composer Takehisa Kosugi, will debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on April 16 2009 on the occasion of Merce Cunningham's 90th birthday. Jones has composed an evening-length work in the form of a complex Kyma Timeline with live multitracking, processing of live input, synthesis, and (in homage to John Cage) chance elements, which he will perform live at BAM April 16-19. Long a champion of improvisation and collaboration in dance, Cunningham and his dance company have worked with a number of musicians on past performances, including composer John Cage. For more information, see: http://www.gibson.com/en%2Dus/Lifestyle/News/john%2Dpaul%2Djones%2Dsonic%2D311/ more...

Ft. Wayne, IN, 16-18 Apr 2009 — The Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States' annual meeting will be at Sweetwater's new concert and lecture hall facilities April 16-18 2009. The theme of the conference is Human Interface Devices and the conference will feature a Kyma Master Class by Carla Scaletti and several Kyma-powered compositions on the concert programs including Brian Belet's System of Shadows for trumpet and Kyma, Scott Miller's Lovely Little Monster for clarinet and Kyma, Carla Scaletti's SlipStick for Continuum controlling Kyma, and Jeffrey Stolet's Gongs of Tiny Insects (fixed media, sounds created using Kyma). more...

London, 14 Apr 2009 — Yannis Kyriakides will be performing live sound for #37, with visuals by film-maker Joost Rekveld and presenting the first UK performance of Folia, his collaboration with guitarist Andy Moor. The Sound Source: Yannis Kyriakides' The Sound of Unsounds will also feature improvised saxophone by John Butcher. Visit Kyriakides' online Cabinet of Curiosities.

Concert dates are:

Tuesday 14 April: King's Place, London 19:30

Tuesday 28 April: Fuseleeds Festival, The Venue, Leeds College of Music 20:00

Wednesday 13 May: Sonorities Festival, Belfast. more...

Atlanta, 04 Apr 2009 — While Dick Robinson (live Kyma electronics) and Jerry Cullum (verbal improvisation) were performing at a Spruill Gallery special exhibit called PLAY, audience members spontaneously began joining in and were serendipitously picked up by the microphone and processed through Kyma, which, of course, enticed them to participate even more. The result was described as a riotously good time and greeted with insane applause at the end. The curator happily invited Robinson and Cullum to perform at the gallery again, any time they like! more...

San Francisco, 23-27 Mar 2009 — Mike Johnson, sound designer at Sony Computer Entertainment America, presented a talk at this year's GDC (Game Developers Conference) 23-27 March 2009 in San Francisco entitled Next Generation Sound Design. In his talk, Johnson detailed some ways in which game audio designers can develop more intriguing and compelling sound effects for games. One of the tools he highlighted was Kyma, which he described as his "Go To" tool for vocal processing and great surround ambience designs. In the real world examples segment, he showcased granular synthesis and cross synthesis sounds in Kyma for the audience. more...

Victoria, BC, 19 Feb 2009 — Composer Andrea Young will be presenting a concert of new works for voice and live electronics on February 19, 2009 in Victoria, BC, Canada. Compositions will include Agostino Di Scipio's Audible Ecosystemics No.3b, Hector Bravo Benard's Pink Noise, Juan Parra Cancino's Tu Recuerdo Manda, André Cormier's En Monochrome, Cassandra Miller's rendition of Falling in Love Again, and the world premiere of Andrea Young's Kokinshu.

Each work uses Kyma in a vastly different way, at times minimalist and subtle, and at other times maximally thunderous and noisy. The new works explore the inside of the mouth, the uncontrollable and infinitesimal squeaks, and the resonant classical tones—all multiplied and extended through Kyma to create a new voice with greatly expanded sonic capacity. more...

Minneapolis, 17-22 Feb 2009 — The Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts 2009 from February 17 - 22, 2009 featured the premier of Scott Miller's Lovely Little Monster for Trio Lorca (flute, clarinet, percussion) plus Kyma. Following the concert, Professor Miller was invited by a member of the audience to present a seminar at the University of Minnesota Brain Barriers Research Center discussing how he uses Kyma and the Paca. Several other Kyma artists were also featured at the festival, including Brett Wartchow, Steve Everett and Matt Malsky. more...

Los Angeles, 11 Feb 2009 — Lou Reed has formed a trio called Best Seat In The House featuring Lou on guitar, Ulrich Krieger on tenor sax and Sarth Calhoun doing live Kyma processing and performing the Continuum Fingerboard. The first release of the trio is a live recording of two nights live at the Redcat in Los Angeles, October 2 and 3, 2008. more...

St. Louis, 31 Jan 2009 — Rich O'Donnell, seesaw drummer and live Kyma electronics, teamed up with poet Anna Tseng Lum and hyperpianist Denman Maroney to create Kai Wan Sing (literally "open play sound") an improvisatory combination of poetry, electronics, and percussion. After a 5-city tour of China in 2007, the event had its North American premiere in St Louis last year. For news on future O'Donnell performances involving improvisation, Kyma processing, poetry, Tai Chi, and visual art, visit New Music Circle. more...

Oxford, 04-06 Sep 2008 — As part of Oxford Contemporary Music's "Magic Hour" event in collaboration with the Oxford Botanical Garden, Kyma user and sound installation artist, Robert Jarvis, will be showing a new work that takes its material, as well as inspiration, from the many bats that visit the garden each evening.

As the bats fly in, in search of food, they emit ultrasonic calls at a frequency above the human range of hearing. Jarvis's installation starts with these calls and processes them in Kyma to create a real-time musical composition for listeners to experience at the same time as viewing the bats.

Robert has been developing the concept of this work for about a year now, and it was recently shortlisted for the 2008 New Music Award (http://www.prsfoundation.co.uk/newmusicaward/echolocation.htm). The performances at Oxford Botanical Garden will be the first time the work has been performed publicly.

As well as the Echolocation installation, Robert has also created another piece in collaboration with students from the local St Barnabas' Primary School. This installation, entitled Predator takes its inspiration from the various insects introduced to the garden by the Botanical gardeners as part of their biological control programme. In a similar manner to how the biocontrol creatures are introduced as natural predators, so too this sound installation aims to introduce a form of audio-control for the public as darkness sets in. Multiple speakers hidden amongst the undergrowth will play short disturbing compositions designed to encourage listeners to move along and ultimately return home.

To track the compositional progress of both the Echolocation and Predator installations, you can read Robert Jarvis's blog at http://themagichour.wordpress.com . more...

Black Rock City, NV, 25 Aug - 3 Sept 2008 — Will Grant, playa name Blue Fire, the music co-lead for Entheon Village 2008, is seeking Kyma performers who already have tickets for Burning Man and who might be interested in participating with him in a sunset recital of Hindu-inspired music. The sound system will be a MacBook Pro and Capybara-320 through 6 Mackie 350v2's in a hexagon 35' across. You can contact him through his website. more...

Kingsport, 14-16 Aug 2008 — Howard Moscovitz' Electro-Music 2008—three days of experimental electronic music concerts, jam sessions, lectures, and demos—will be held from 14-16 August 2008 at the Renaissance Center in Kingsport, Tennessee. Covering a wide range of electronic music including circuit bending, computer music, electro-jazz, modular synthesis, musique concrete, improvisation, noodles (generated or automatic music and algorithmic composition), multi-media, visual art and more, the focus of the festival is on participant involvement, sharing, community development, audience education, and great music. A three-day pass is only $50. more...

Richmond, 12 Aug 2008 — Rob Rayle is playing several festivals this summer while continuing work on his second album (for which Rayle is using his own custom-coded Kyma physical modeling software on nearly every track). For more details on his current and future activities, visit his site. more...

Los Angeles, 31 Jul-Aug. 2 2008 — Phil Curtis and SoNu performed Anne LeBaron's opera Sucktion as part of the New Original Works Festival 2008 at the CalArts REDCAT Theate at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, July 31 - August 2, 2008. Phil used the Kyma/Osculator/Wii setup to turn a vacuum cleaner into a musical controller for LeBaron's tale of a woman's cyber-erotic transformation from abject housewife into a self-sufficient cyborg. Check SoNu's news page for more SoNu performances. more...

Brooklyn, 28 Jul 2008 — On July 28th, Sarth Calhoun's Lucibel Crater played a live show at Zebulon, a musician-owned cafe in Brooklyn, New York. more...

Berlin, 23 Jul 2008 — Agostino Di Scipio's Ecosystemic sound installation in 2 abandoned or dismantled rooms, OHNE TITLE/UNTITLED, was performed at Festival Inventionen 08 in Berlin on July 23, 2008. Kees Tazelaar's Crosstalk was performed on August 1st as part of the same festival. more...

Yamaguchi, 21 Jul 2008 — Gilles Jobin was invited to Japan this summer to present a production of TEXT TO SPEECH (music by Cristian Vogel) on 21 JULY - YAMAGUCHI CENTER FOR ARTS AND MEDIA - YAMAGUCHI, and on 25 & 26 JULY - SPIRAL ART CENTER - TOKYO. more...

Annecy, 25 Jun 2008 — In his fifth collaboration with Swiss choreographer Gilles Jobin, Cristian Vogel completed the sound design and music for Text to Speech exclusively in Kyma. Performed on 6 speakers, with front of house system, for a total of 7 sound sources and 8 sound emitters, the music draws its inspiration from shortwave and Very Low Frequency radio, the ambience and sonic palettes of natural radio, espionage counting stations, and radio hammers in addition to synthetic voices reading warped texts. Vogel composed the music on site in Annecy and Barcelona using the latest version of his track-dependent spectral resynthesis and modification design, dubbed Spectral Fire, to yield an array of track-dependent spectral delays, waveshaping, transposition and smearing. For more information on the music, the choreography, and the performances, see the Last.fm website. more...

Munich, 21 Jun 2008 — Swiss sound designer Daniel Dettwiler used Kyma in the creation of a permanent sound installation for BMW Platz, one of the largest rooms in the new BMW Museum in Munich, first opened to the public on June 21 2008. The walls of BMW Platz are giant screens displaying subtle pictures while a 300-speaker acousmonium plays granulated cello and piano sound textures generated in Kyma. For BMW, the aim was to create a museum where the architecture, media, and the audio all interact perfectly with the cars on display. Idee und Klang's proposal for the space was selected by a jury in an international competition held two years ago. more...

Pesaro, 16-17 Jun 2008 — From 16-18 June 2008, as part of Il Suono Aperto, Joel Chadabe presented a concert of electronic music and conducted master classes for Eugenio Giordani's students at the Conservatorio di Musica G. Rossini in Pesaro. Using the Kyma system owned by Eugenio Giordani (well-known to the international Kyma community as the creator of the EuVerb), Chadabe presented his Many Times... for live performer and Kyma in what Chadabe describes as a "gorgeous hall" having "wonderful acoustics." more...

San José, 14 Jun 2008 — Brian Belet's new piece Name Droppings includes the voice of Jeff Stolet and others reading excerpts from program notes and composers' bios lightly processed and assembled in Kyma. This piece was commissioned in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Experimental Music Studios at the University of Illinois. more...

Ottawa, 07-14 Jun 2008 — From 7-14 June 2008, composer Edmund Eagan and dance artist Ken Emig created hexagons of sound for a live installation based on the architecture of the National Arts Center in Ottawa. Starting at noon on Saturday June 7, Eagan and Emig performed outside the theatre using 3-channel sound and 6 cameras capturing a hexagonal 360 panorama projected through 6 projectors onto six walls enclosing a hexagonal fountain as a slightly different mix of the audio was presented inside the building. Live input from three amplified sources placed at the vertices of an equilateral triangle located around the center of the hexagonal dome pictured in the online article at Guerilla Magazine: 17 were processed live through Kyma. more...

Brooklyn, 30 May 2008 — The Bunker Podcast 23 features Cristian Vogel recorded live at The Bunker in Brooklyn on May 30, 2008 in a one hour improvisation using his Neverengine design and other Kyma Sounds. Everything is about live choices in this set (there are no sequences or presets), and it's exciting to hear how Vogel occasionally throws the whole thing into chaos and then reins it back into a more conventional groove. Listen also for the metric modulations and the smooth morphs between musical spaces where the changes along each parameter are so smooth, it feels like an optical illusion in time and acoustic space.

According to Cristian, "The sound quality is something that I have to refine all the time, because there are so few sound elements that it has to sound absolutely high-quality when it comes out of the generating algorithms. But Kyma makes that part easy, because it sounds so good loud!" So hook up your large speakers, turn up the volume, and have a listen! more...

Minneapolis, 29 May 2008 — Composer Scott Miller joined forces with Rosemary Williams, Pat O'Keefe, Jacqueline Ultan, Norah Long, & Jeff Lambert to investigate models and conceptions of measuring and experiencing time using Prague's Astronomical clock as a metaphor. Through multi-channel video projection, live performance and interactive electronic audio environments, The Cosmic Engine explores the tension between the strict architecture of time-telling and "the dissolution of that structure into absurdity and chaos." The Cosmic Engine premiered on May 30 & 31, 2008 as part of The Electric Eyes New Music and Media Festival at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis. more...

Mexico City, 26 May 2008 — On Monday, 26th May 2008, composer Hector Bravo-Benard performed fellow composer Agostino Di Scipio's Audible Ecosystemics 3b, Background Noise Study With Mouth Performer, at the 30th Foro Internacional de Musica Nueva Manuel Enriquez with Carmina Escobar. The concert was at the Blas Galindo Hall of the Centro Nacional de las Artes. more...

Palo Alto, 21 May 2008 — On May 21, 2008, Kelly Fitz used Kyma to play examples during his seminar, Techniques for Digital Sound Morphing, presented at the CCRMA Colloquium. more...

New York, 20-21 May 2008 — Kyma will be assisting the Flea in its stated mission of "Raising a joyful hell in a small space" as part of the three day Electronic Music Foundation EMF Lab concert series in New York, 20-21 May 2008. more...

Athens, 17-18 May 2008 — Carla Scaletti and Kurt Hebel will be participating in the ElectroMediaWorks Festival in Athens. On May 17, Scaletti will present a 3 hour seminar on Kyma at the Centre for Music Composition and Performance. On May 18, there will be a concert of live Kyma music by Carla Scaletti and Joel Chadabe. Both events are open to the public. From May 20-22, Chadabe and Scaletti have been invited by Andreas Mniestris to present seminars and workshops on Kyma for his composition students at Ionian University. more...

New York, 15 May 2008 — Sarth Calhoun and Lucibel Crater have a new website on which you can find news of their upcoming CD release party and celebratory performance at 7 pm this Thursday, May 15th at Joe's Pub in New York. more...

Athens, 14-18 May 2008 — The ElectroMediaWorks Festival EMW 08 will feature live electronics, interactive performances, electroacoustic music, video and installations in Athens 14-18 May 2008. Andreas Mniestris, Marinos Giannoukakis, Gerard Pape, Joel Chadabe, Carla Scaletti, Kurt Hebel, Robert Scott Thompson, Michael Filimovicz and others will be presenting work at the festival. On Sunday, May 18, starting at 14:30, there will be a three-hour seminar on Kyma followed by a concert of live Kyma music.

The week following, Scaletti, Chadabe, and Hebel will be presenting seminars at EPHMEE (the Electroacoustic Music Research and Applications Laboratory) at Ionian University directed by Andreas Mniestris. Check out the interviews and join in the discussion on the Forum. All events are free and open to the public at The Art Factory located at Lamias 6 & Pireos (after Praktiker). more...

Forlì, 13 May 2008 — On 3 May 2008, Agostino Di Scipio put on a concert at Teatro Diego Fabbri in Forlì (Italia). Di Scipio performed live electronics on his Sul rumore di fondo and presented a lecture on Systems of clouds, particles and ashes, migrating sounds. Also on the program were Iannis Xenakis' Polytopes, Analogique B, and La Légend d'Eer. more...

Eugene, 03-05 May 2008 — On May 3-5 2008, Carla Scaletti & Kurt Hebel have been invited by Jeffrey Stolet to the University of Oregon for a three-day event featuring music, workshops, individual coaching, and lectures. The events begin on Saturday night May 3 with a concert of live Kyma music by Carla Scaletti and Jeff Stolet's composition students. The concert will include the premieres of two new pieces by Scaletti: SlipStick (for Kyma and Continuum) and Cyclonic (for Kyma solo). On Sunday May 4, from 12-6 pm, Scaletti will present a 6 hour workshop on sound design for interactive performance. The workshop is open to the public; please contact Professor Stolet to make a reservation. On Monday, Scaletti will work with individual composition students during the morning and will present an afternoon lecture for Jeff Stolet's electronic music classes. more...

Paris, 01 May 2008 — Gerard Pape will be using Kyma as part of the new laptop orchestra he has started in Paris called CLSI (Circle for the Liberation of Sound and Image). CLSI is a collective of 8 composers who play only written scores and who interpret the works of their fellow composers. more...

Ashville, NC, 29 Apr 2008 — Lou Reed of Velvet Underground fame is currently touring the east coast of the US and he's brought Sarth Calhoun along to live-sample and process the band through Kyma. Sarth is involved in nearly every song, processing bass, guitar, vocals, and drums in turn. more...

San Jose, CA, 23 Apr 2008 — On Wednesday, April 23 in San Jose, this year's New Music South Bay concert featured music by Brian Belet, Jeff Stolet, and others. Belet's trombone quartet Refraction: Three Gestural Reflections was performed by the SJSU Trombone Quartet, and Stolet's Gongs of Tiny Insects was diffused through a multichannel playback system. Also on the program was Allen Strange's NGate and Belet's System of Shadows, both written for Stephen Ruppenthal performing on trumpet and flugelhorn processed through live electronics. more...

Sydney, 18 Apr 2008 — Garth Paine performed a new work for flute and Kyma and a new work for SynC with Michael Atherton (Waterphone and bowls) in the Aurora Festival at the Joan Sutherland Centre for Performing Arts on Friday 18 April.

From January 6-22 2008, Garth Paine was on tour in Köln, London, Leicester and Frankfurt. Paine performed live with Wiimote and Wacom tablet controlling Kyma and also led several workshops and seminars on musical interfaces. Paine's newest work is for Singing Bowls, Hand Bells, sensors and Capybara/Kyma system. For more information on this work and other work by his Synsonics project, see http://www.syncsonics.com/. more...

Lisbon, 17 Apr 2008 — Carlos Alberto Augusto took Kyma out of his studio for the first time to perform live for a new production of the 15th century German writer Johannes Van Saaz's "The Plowman from Bohemia" featuring the composer/musician as a third character. In February Augusto also used Kyma in a live improvisation with bowed instruments (violin, viola, cello. double bass, guitarviol) plus percussion at the Mascavado Festival at Lisbon's "Centro Cultural O Século". more...

Baton Rouge, 26 Mar 2008 — Stephen David Beck presented the world premiere of his new work for Wiimote and Kyma, A Little Light Saber Rattling on "Cinema for the Ears," a concert of experimental electronic and computer-generated music on March 26, at the Manship Theatre in downtown Baton Rouge. The performance was presented using the 27-channel surround sound system called ICAST and in "electroacoustic cabaret" style, with casual tables, open seating and friendly discussion. more...

Urbana, 07 Feb 2008 — In February 2008, John Ritz presented a Composers' Forum at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign discussing recent works using Kyma. As part of Ritz' residency, violinist Yao-Tzu Lu presented his DMA recital of music for violin and Kyma—including works by John Ritz, Steve Everett, and Brian Belet—at the Music Building Auditorium. more...

Berlin, Through Feb 2008 — Agostino Di Scipio is teaching in Berlin at the Elektronisches Studio of the Technische Univesitaet through February 2008 as this year's "Edgard Varése Guest Professor" where he is presenting seminars on his compositions with examples using Kyma and PD. more...

London, Press Release — Robert Jarvis has been shortlisted for the 'New Music Award' for his proposed new Kyma-powered sound installation for the London Wetland Centre. Entitled ECHOLOCATION, the piece will take the form of a responsive composition for a 'choir' of bat detectors that will pick up the ultrasonic calls of the bats that visit the reserve of an evening and transform them into a multichannel musical experience for visitors the following day.

The award seeks to recognise those who are pushing the boundaries of new music, and will eventually present its winner with £50,000 towards the creation and performance of a creatively adventurous new composition. The winner will be announced in April and the first performance of the new work will be in the summer of 2009. More details about the award itself, together with the other shortlisted candidates, can be found on the PRSF website at: http://www.prsfoundation.co.uk/newmusicaward/index.htm . more...

Rome, 23 Dec 2007 — Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi, Unidentified Sound Object, will be online Sunday, 23rd December 2007, for a live gig via the Mogulus Internet broadcast network. Starting 21:00 UTC time, you can enjoy a live video feed of USO performing live with Kyma and Ableton Live from Rome via either the USO Project blog or on the USO Mogulus Channel. Later rebroadcasts will also be available on the USO channel. Check for updates here: http://usoproject.blogspot.com/2007/11/uso-live-internet-broadcast.html more...

Bloomington, IN, 15 Dec 2007 — At Art Hospital in Bloomington, Indiana on December 15, 2007, audio artists/composers Silvia Matheus and John Dawson created a live improvisational dialog using Kyma, MAX/MSP running on a laptop and several controllers. As Matheus describes it, "The thrill of the performance is to keep the momentum going—the various sound textures have to transform continuously." Matheus and Dawson created sound textures with variable loops, pitch and time variation, live processing, and live panning/mixing. Some of Silvia's sounds were also sent to John Dawson's environment for further processing before being sent to multiple speakers. more...

's Hertogenbosch, 08 Dec 2007 — theatre production of Piet Arfeuille and de Wetten van Kepler.

sound design and live performance of the score by Frederik Van de Moortel - Sakuran more...

San Jose, 15 Nov 2007 — Brian Belet's work-in-progress for multiple trumpets and Kyma system was presented on Thursday, November 15, at 7:30 pm, at San Jose State University. Belet has been collaborating with trumpet virtuoso Stephen Ruppenthal on the work in which all computer sounds are generated in real-time using the trumpet as source material for processing, Stephen improvises with the computer sounds as they occur. Three movements (out of the projected 4 movement piece) were previewed in San Jose with the entire work scheduled for premiere in late January on a concert in Washington state. more...

Lüneburg, 21 Oct 2007 — After the first performance of Requiem for Soprano and Kyma at the Music Biennale Zagreb Festival, composer Zlatko Tanodi and soloist Lidija Horvat-Dunjko were invited to open the 33. Festival NEUE MUSIK LÜNEBURG 2007. The German premiere of Requiem is scheduled for the 21st of October 2007. Tanodi writes, “The idea of composing Requiem first came into my mind when I was working with Lidija Horvat Dunjko on the composition 'Anima – Animus ', also written for soprano and Kyma, and premiered at the 2001 Music Biennale Zagreb. Considering the fact that this is interactive music in which the female voice creates and controls musical parameters generated by an electronic device, the composition should have been entitled 'Requiem for a Woman Alone'. (according to Schaeffer's 'Symphonie pour un homme seul'). The piece begins with a composer's summary – a flashback made of quoted sections taken from other compositions which guide us through the time tunnel towards bright light. And this is the moment when the Mass for the Dead begins...” more...

St. Paul, 28-30 Sep 2007 — Zeitgeist performed Shape Shifting: Shades of Transformation at Studio Z in St. Paul, Minnesota (September 28-30, 2007) before taking the show on tour throughout the Czech Republic during October 2007. Shape Shifting: Shades of Transformation is a collaboration of Zeitgeist, composer Scott Miller, poet Philippe Costaglioli, and video-artist Ron Gregg to create an evening-length musical response to the nature and challenges of change. more...

Missoula, 21 Sep 2007 — Brian Belet was the featured guest composer for the Mountain Computer Music Festival at University of Montana on September 21 2007. Belet presented a lecture "Composing in 2007: Why do we do it? What does it mean?", an interactive installation Lobby Reforms, for unsuspecting audience, concert hall lobby, and Kyma processing (2006), (Disturbed) Radiance, for piano and Kyma processing (2003), and Still Harmless [BASS]ically, for electric bass and Kyma processing (2000), featuring the composer on electric bass. In Lobby Reforms, the pre-concert sounds of people passing through the lobby are transported into the concert hall (as well as back into the lobby) in an informal collage of social activity that differentiates the concert experience from the isolated activity of listening to music through headphones. The transition zone from the outside world to the inner container of the concert hall is an important time and place that physically and metaphorically defines the "before, during, and after" of the concert experience. The audio sources are processed in real-time and then directed back through the sound system to create a sonic environment that leads naturally into the concert itself as the lobby sounds eventually diminish as a result of the audience leaving that space for the concert hall. more...

Oporto, 20 Sep 2007 — Carlos Alberto Augusto's The Moment of Being for marimba, glockenspiel, Japanese woodblock, eTrack (produced entirely within Kyma), and the player's voice, was premiered September 20th at Casa da Musica in Oporto, Portugal as part of the Musica Viva Festival. Pedro Carneiro, the virtuoso Portuguese percussionist to whom the work is dedicated, performed the premiere. The entire program was performed again on October 13th at the French-Portuguese Cultural Center in Lisbon. The piece will be recorded and the concert will be videotaped for future release. The electronic track of The Moment of Being is based exclusively on the sounds of Carneiro's marimba; specially composed musical phrases, notes, and even the sound of the mallet handles were sampled and later processed in Kyma to produce the eTrack. more...

Ottawa, 12 Sep 2007 — Sculptor/dancer/acoustic artist Ken Emig's work deals with echoes and reflections, so when he and composer Edmund Eagan collaborated on a live performance for the opening of Emig's show at La Filature in Ottawa, they tried to express these same ideas using sound and movement. Eagan performed in one room (with light boxes) and Emig simultaneously performed in a video shooting space, a room featuring his dish sculpture and another room housing his cube sculpture. The spaces were sonically linked with Eagan using Kyma, the Continuum, a Mbiraski, Logic to process a microphone-feed from Emig's room, creating echo loops using delay lines and using the two different spaces as resonance before sending the resulting mix back into Emig's room. The audience was free to migrate through the gallery during the performance. Emig danced in front of a dual projection / dual camera video feedback setup creating multiple echoes of him on the wall, and a camera directly above Eagan captured his hands on the Continuum surface, projecting the image onto the same wall. This triple projection was then captured AGAIN by another camera, which projected it into the room where Eagan was performing. A DVD is in the works. more...

Copenhagen, 30 Aug 2007 — Hector Bravo-Benard performed Styrotron (2007) live at the ICMC in Copenhagen at the end of August. Styrotron takes styrofoam, a packing material always shipped alongside computer equipment and usually discarded as trash, and reinterprets it as a musical instrument. Different pieces of styrofoam are excited with a violin bow, or rubbed against each other, producing noises and pitched sounds with a rich spectrum that are only partially controllable, and whose behavior is predictable only from a rather general point of view. Using a constructed noise instrument such as this one, without any real history, also makes it possible to eliminate the connotations that are usually associated with traditional musical instruments, in order to be able to focus more freely on the exploration of sound itself. The acoustic sounds produced by the styrofoam are taken as the only sound source, and they also generate most of the control signals used as these sounds get transformed in real time through a processing network implemented in Kyma. The performer controls only the transitional points and some simple processing parameters through the use of a pedal. The large-scale structure of the pieces is clearly defined, but many of the smaller details are left open, as a result of the chaotic nature of the sound source itself. more...

San Diego, 05 Aug 2007 — IMAGO is presenting their audio-visual triptych on this years SIGGRAPH in San Diego, California. They are looking for other options and venues to perform the piece, since they have to travel all the way over the big lake. Any suggestions are welcome! more...

Nedde, Limoges, 14 Jul - 04 Nov 2007 — Kyma user, Robert Jarvis, will be taking his Capybara to The City of Insects at the beginning of July for a two-week residency. During his stay he will delve into the world of insect song and other entomological sounds and create a surround sound composition inspired by recordings that he makes in the local area.

Imagine a room full of butterflies… Imagine living in a beehive or an ants’ nest… Imagine going for a ride on a back of a dragonfly… what would that sound like? Robert’s new work allows the listener access to this unique sound world and to imagine life through the ears of an insect.

The resulting surround sound installation will be featured at the museum for visitors to experience from July 15th through to November 4th, 2007. Follow Robert's investigations into all things creepy crawly at http://www.entomophonix.wordpress.com more...

Syracuse, 15 Jul 2007 — Ceremonial Rituals, a new piece by Norbert Oldani, will be aired on NPR station WCNY-FM on Sunday, July 15, 2007, from 2-3 pm, as part of the weekly Syracuse Society for New Music— Fresh Ink program. Oldani made use of indigenous rhythms and South American pan flute performance techniques mixed with Kyma granulation sounds. more...

Lefkada, 11-13 Jul 2007 — Kyma will play a part in at least two events for the July 11-13 Sound and Music Computing Conference SMC07 in Greece: a new sound installation by Marinos Gianoukakis and Joel Chadabe's Many Times... for flute and live Kyma interaction. more...

Paris, 09-10 Jul 2007 — On July 09-10, Federico Placidi is presenting an introduction to Kyma with particular emphasis on granular synthesis and live controls for students in the CCMIX summer course. more...

Corfu, 05-09 Jul 2007 — Joel Chadabe will present a three-day seminar at Ionian University in Corfu, Greece, entitled: "A Dynamic Approach to Sound Design and Interactive Performance with Kyma" from July 5-9. more...

Vienna, 23 Jun 2007 — Bruno Liberda will be performing his metaphonics exploration, JETZT, on the 23rd of June 2007 from 2-8 pm at the Museum und Archiv für Arbeit und Industrie im Viertel unter dem Wienerwald, a museum recognizing working people as the true heroes of history and the proper focus of modern historical research. During a performance of JETZT, the audience listens and watches screen projections of Liberda in the process of composing a new piece of music using Kyma. more...

Rome, 22 Jun 2007 — Joel Chadabe will be in Rome on June 22, 2007 for Flussi Correnti, an outdoor multidisciplinary art event at Piazza Tevere (between Ponte Sisto and Mazzini) on the Tiber river. Sponsored by Tevereterno, the event will begin at sunset with Luminalia, a new light installation by artist and Tevereterno co-founder Kristin Jones and architect Daniel Brown. At 21.00 and again at 24.00 there will be a performance of water-related compositions by the Ars Ludi ensemble, and at 23.00 there will be a presentation of water-related Ambienti Sonori from Ear to the Earth, including two Kyma-generated pieces: Joel Chadabe's Green Island (based on the sounds of water hitting the rocks in Penobscot Bay, Maine) and Carla Scaletti's Frog Pool Farm (based on the sounds of frogs singing and splashing in a pond on Illinois farmland). Kristin Jones and Tevereterno have worked with the city of Rome to create the Piazza Tevere as a site for collaborative projects that bring artists and the public together for greater environmental awareness in an urban context. Last year, 10,000 people attended an all-night program involving visual artists and composers. This year, attendance is expected to double. more...

Barcelona, 14 Jun 2007 — Cristian Vogel's band, Night of the Brain, performed songs from their debut album Wear This World Out at the Sonar Festival in Barcelona last Thursday evening as part of the Station 55 Records showcase. Vogel used the Wiimote and OSCulator to control Kyma alongside the traditional guitar, voice and other electronics. More about the band, their debut album, and a video with the angel of death on a Segway, can be explored at the No Future website. more...

Chicago, 09 Jun 2007 — A R Rahman, award-winning composer/vocalist/keyboardist, played to sold-out arenas in North America this summer with his 3rd Dimension Tour, a 3.5 hour show performed in three languages and demonstrating the composer's mastery of a broad range of musical styles. Audiences in Chicago and Toronto were treated to a tantalizing glimpse of something new when Rahman performed a short solo of Carnatic music on Continuum fingerboard (controlling Kyma). Rahman, who is classically trained in both Carnatic and western musical traditions said that, as a child, he loved playing the keyboard but at the same time he found it frustrating not to be able to produce the microtonal tuning and ornaments of Indian classical music on a standard 12-tone keyboard. His dream is to inspire kids to continue the classical tradition by combining the world of digital audio with that of classical Carnatic music. more...

Bourges, 09 Jun 2007 — Agostino Di Scipio performed live electronics and sound diffusion for a performance of his 3 pezzi muti at the Festival Synthése in Bourges on 9 June 2007 with Ciro Longobardi on piano. more...

New York, 04 Jun 2007 — SynC (Garth Paine and Michael Atherton) is performing at the New York Electronic Arts Festival for the entire first half of the concert. All three works use Kyma:

Atmospheric Ripple: Garth plays the flute and uses its amplitude and pitch to control the processing

Cyberdidj Australis for didjeribone (slide didjeridu) and electronics: Garth uses a Wacom tablet (in his signature palette-like style) to control the processing.

Encounter for hurdi-gurdi and electronics: Garth is using the WiiMote to drive the Kyma processing of the hurdi-gurdi.

Sync will also be performing Cyberdidj Australis on the opening night of the NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) conference in NYC on June 7 at 6:30. more...

Philadelphia, 01-03 Jun 2007 — Electro-music 2007, dubbed the Woodstock of Electronic Music by the Philadelphia Inquirer, will take place from June 1-3 at the Cheltenham Art Center in Philadelphia. The brainchild of composer Howard Moscovitz, the event promises three full days of experimental electronic music, jam sessions, visual music, and demos. Starting on June 1, the electro-music website will stream live audio as well as a live chat room from noon to midnight on each day of the festival. more...

Rye Bay, East Sussex, 26 May 2007 — Kyma user Robert Jarvis' 'Keybird' sound installation utilises a conventional piano keyboard of which every note is assigned to the call of a different bird. Visitors to the space encounter the keyboard and by pressing the different notes they trigger the different birdsongs and before long the room fills with moving sounds. more...

Florence, 24 May thru Oct 2007 — Lorenzo Brusci used Kyma for music and sound design, and USO Project (Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi) used Kyma's SampleCloud for the latest incarnation of "Giardino Sonoro La Limonaia dell'Imperialino" Sonic Garden Lab. more...

Kiev, 20 May 2007 — Yuri Spitsyn will be performing live with Kyma on May 20 2007 in Kiev at the EM-VISIA Festival organized by the Association for New Music in the Ukraine. Spitsyn will perform b-i-r-d-r-e-a-m for Theremin and Welcome to the Machine! for acoustic laptop. He will also be presenting a talk during the conference entitled Kyma: Survivor in the Age of Native Processing. more...

Ames, 18 May 2007 — In addition to the premiere of Mario Davidovsky's Synchronisms #12, there were several pieces at the SEAMUS Conference (held March 8-10, 2007 at Iowa State University) featuring live interactive Kyma processing, including John Ritz' a well-devised trap for string quartet and live, adaptive Kyma processing, Amaro Borges' Ecoando for cello and live Kyma capture/processing, and Scott Miller's Chimera for violin and Kyma. more...

Cologne, 17 May 2007 — The Queen is the Supreme Power in the Realm by Yannis Kyriakides is scheduled for its premiere performance on Thursday, 17 May at 18:00 in the Theater am Tanzbrunnen in Köln. Based on the telegraphic codebooks of the late 19th century, Kyriakides was commissed to compose the piece by MusikFabrik and the ZKM. The concert will be repeated on the 18th of May at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, and again in November 2007 at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in the UK. Kyriakides will be performing the live electronics using Kyma for this semi-composed, semi-improvised piece, and will also be accompanied by live video artist HC Gilje. more...

Houston, 10 May 2007 — Pulizter-prize-winning composer Mario Davidovsky was recently commissioned by SEAMUS and a consortium of American universities to compose two new pieces in his famous Synchronisms series: Synchronisms #11 (for contrabass) and Synchronisms #12 (for bass clarinet). Davidovsky completed the electronic portion of Synchronism #12 at REMLabs in collaboration with composer Kurt Stallmann.

Davidovsky wanted to create an electronics part derived largely from samples of the clarinet, bass clarinet, and piano, so he and Stallman used Kyma to analyze the samples for spectral content and to develop/modify spectral data for resynthesis. They also used several other Kyma tools to manipulate the samples and generate synthesized material. According to Stallman, "Davidovsky enjoyed hearing 'Kyma' through the speakers each time it started up and grew attached to that sound icon." more...

Ockley, 04 May thru 28 Oct 2007 — Robert Jarvis' latest sound installation is for the renowned Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden (www.hannahpescharsculpture.com).

Situated in a secluded part of the garden known as 'The Oriental Pond', a series of musical compositions emanate from the undergrowth. Fast moving but gentle musical patterns derived from the plants' DNA contrast with slower melodies based on different amino acid sequences governing the processes of growth and aging. The sounds slowly fade in, teasing the ears with their presence, and quietly dance around the pond before fading out again returning the listener to the garden's gentle soundscape.

The installation is the result of an eight month residency where Robert has been investigating related themes connected with the plants of the garden, including the ultrasonic acoustic emmisions of plants as well as the sonification of genetic data. A weblog diary at http://www.gr0w.wordpress.com documents many useful resources available on the internet.

The music was composed entirely in Kyma, also utilizing Harm Visser's physical modelling toolkit as well as advice and input from the Kyma community. more...

Boston, 28 Apr 2007 — Several Kyma users, including BT, Brian Evans, and Dennis Miller were featured on the VISUAL MUSIC MARATHON at Northeastern University, Boston, Saturday, April 28th, 2007, a 12-hour screening of time-based art works that reflect the convergence of musical composition and animated images. All new works presented at the Marathon will be included in a special permanent collection that will be housed in Northeastern's Snell Library. For an hour-by-hour schedule and preview of works that were shown at the event, visit http://www.music.neu.edu/vmm/schedule.html. For a complete listing of all events, visit the Boston Cyberarts Festival website. more...

Zagreb, 21 Apr 2007 — Zlatko Tanodi, Professor of Electronic and Film Composition at the Academy of Music, University of Zagreb, will be premiering his interactive composition, Requiem for soprano and Kyma, on 21st of April at the Music Biennale Zagreb Festival. Meanwhile, he has just finished The Queen Katarina K. K., an historical musical based on the last Bosnian queen. more...

Abbeville, 13 - 22 Apr 2007 — Une note, un chant, Robert Jarvis a conçu un clavier de piano peu ordinaire. En effet, en guise du do, ré, mi, fa, sol … un chant d’Avocette, de Bergeronnette, de Chardonneret décline ainsi l’alphabet jusqu’à la dernière touche du clavier....

Kyma user Robert Jarvis' 'Keybird' sound installation utilises a conventional piano keyboard of which every note is assigned to the call of a different bird. Visitors to the space encounter the keyboard and by pressing the different notes they trigger the different birdsongs and before long the room fills with moving sounds. more...

Linz, 13 Apr 2007 — Cristian Vogel (Mute / Station 55) will be performing live during Ars Electronica in Linz on 13 April 16:00 at the Red Bull Music Academy. First, the Info-session: a dialog with Cristian Vogel and Patrick Pulsinger! Then, at 22:00, Electro-acoustic Madness with Patrick Pulsinger and your friend from MMA Gerhard Daurer/Richard Eigner/Roman Gerold in one special improvised live set. Modular synths meet percussion gear and granular processing. Cristian Vogel presents his new Kyma programmed Livetool — the Neverengine. Free participation with advance notification at http://redbullmusicacademy.com Limited number of participants! more...

New York, 2-4 Apr 2009 — The City University of New York put on the first New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival and Conference, April 2-4, 2009 at the Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, and at other locations in New York City. A program of concerts, papers, demonstrations and other events included works by several Kyma users including Fred Szymanski, Yuri Spitsyn, and Steve Everett. For a full schedule of events, see: http://www.nycemf.org/schedule.php. more...

Bari, 24 Mar 2007 — Electroacoustic remixer Mimmo Galizia has recently branched out into using Kyma for live guitar effects in his band Uross during their last gig in Bari on March 24th. URoss' motto, "Nel silenzio...mi son perso!" underlines their relaxed and self-described "healing, easy-listening concrete" sound. more...

Kerkplein 3, Breda, 21 Mar - 21 April 2007 — Spring has arrived and so too has the return of Kyma user Robert Jarvis' 'Keybird' sound installation. Upon entering the exhibition space, visitors encounter a conventional piano keyboard of which every note is assigned to the call of a different bird. Pressing the notes triggers the different birdsongs and before long the room fills with moving sounds. more...

Paris, Hamburg, Spring 2007 — Cristian Vogel used Kyma to compose the music for choreographer Gille Jobins's Double Deux, and he did it on-site in Geneva just a couple of weeks after he first got his system. Jobin writes, "I can testify! Cristian used ONLY Kyma to make one hour of music for the piece. Which was a bit worrying when he arrived with a machine in a box, and a telephone book size instruction book... But with a lot of sweat and a lot of talent, he managed to make a fantastic score. I must say that using the Kyma concept was great for this piece. The 'morphing' of one sound into another, of one patch into another, the continuous state of transition was just the right thing for the choreography of this project."

Double Deux explores the concept of pairs, of 2s in all combinations, additive and multiplicative: binary symmetry, coupling, the uniting of two, and binary division of cells necessary to produce life. The piece is now on tour and will be in Rennes, France, Bruxelles, Belgium, Paris, France, and Hamburg, Germany in Spring of 2007. You can read more about the pieces, see photos, see video clips, and order a DVD at the Parano Foundation website: http://www.parano.org more...

Brussels, 14 Mar - 16 Sept 2007 — From the 14th of March until the 16th of September 2007, Italian image-and-sound designer Riccardo Mazza is presenting a visual and audio environment at the Atomium in Bruxelles. Six projectors in sync with 10 spatial audio zones paint the 150+ square meter space in one of the spheres of the Atomium where INSIDE, a sculpture from Italian artist E.T. De Paris is on display. The audio, synthesized and spatialized phrases from Italo-French poet J.C. Oberto, was created entirely in Kyma, including the spatial algorithms. Mazza specifically chose to create the entire concept using the Kyma signal flow editor. more...

Romainville, 01 Mar 2007 — The Centre de Création Musicale Iannis Xenakis is now offering memberships with benefits that include access to CCMIX courses (up to 3 free short-courses a year as an auditor), special ticket prices for CCMIX concerts, and discounts on CCMIX CDs and books. There are two Kyma-related short-courses coming up in March 2007 that could be included as part of your membership: a week-long introduction to composing for real time performance with Kyma presented by Bruno Liberda, and a three-day workshop presented by Agostino Di Scipio on his ecosystemic approach to composition with Kyma.

Other Kyma-related courses will be offered later in the summer and fall of this year. For full details, please go to http://www.ccmix.com/english/index.html and select Members from the CCMIX menu at the top left. For further information, please contact the Director of CCMIX, Gerard Pape at the email address listed on the Contacts page (also available from the CCMIX menu). more...

Napoli, 23-24 Feb 2007 — Agostino Di Scipio and his students have organized several concerts for the Dissonanzen Festival in Naples. On 23 February 2007, Francesco Scagliola will be using Kyma to do the live electronics for Giacinto Scelsi AITSI (for piano and "distortion" device) and Michelangelo Lupone CICLO ASTRALE 2 (violin, tape, and electronics). The next day, 24 February, there is a presentation of Di Scipio's PAYSAGES HISTORIQUES, produced last year by IMEB (Bourges), which includes the 6 tape pieces composed between 1998 and 2005, using Kyma. Di Scipio will be using Kyma to diffuse two of the pieces over a multichannel system: PAESAGGIO STORICO n.3 (Paris, La Robotique des Lumières) and PAESAGGIO STORICO n.4 (New York, Background Media Noise). more...

Minneapolis, 21-22 Feb 2007 — As part of the Spark Pre-Show: Twin Cities Showcase at The Whole Music Club on Februrary 20th, Scott Miller and Zeitgeist performed "Jardins Mecaniques" from their show Shape Shifting. On Wednesday, Februrary 21st, at the Spark Nitelife at the Nomad World Pub, Pat O'Keefe (bass clarinet) and Scott Miller (Kyma) will perform "improvised/interactive electroacoustic grooviness." Finally, as part of the Spark Festival, Marion Judish will perform the short-version of Miller's Chimera No. 2 at the Southern Theater on Thursday, February 22nd. more...

Prague, 08 Feb 2007 — David Moss used Kyma for live processing and mangling of both voice and music as the host of an IllFM internet radio show originating in Prague on 8 February 2007 from 8pm to 12pm GMT. The show featured DJ's and live artists from the Czech underground music scene and also includes some of Moss' custom circuit-bent keyboards and gameboy-generated sonic chaos. more...

St. Paul, 30-31 Jan 2007 — On January 30 and 31, Scott Miller premiered a new collaborative work with poet Philippe Costaglioli and director Jeffrey Bleam at Studio Z in St. Paul, MN, and at St. Cloud State University, MN. The work, titled What You Have Taken, is a dramatic work for spoken word in an interactive electroacoustic environment provided by Kyma. These concerts also featured the U.S. premier of Chimera No. 2 performed by violinist Marion Judish. At SEAMUS in Ames, IA this coming March, Miller will present Chimera No. 2.1, a four channel acousmatic remix of the work for violin and tape, born of performer scheduling conflicts. more...

Anaheim, 18-21 Jan 2007 — Edmund Eagan will become something of a one-man convergence of new instruments, controllers, and Kyma at the 2007 NAMM show in Anaheim California this January 18-21. If you stop by the Haken Audio booth, you'll be able to meet Continuum inventor Lippold Haken and hear a live performance by Ed Eagan on Continuum fingerboard controlling his Kalimba sound (created in the Kyma TAU editor) mixed with a live feed from a stereo trilobyte Mbiraski, a beautiful new instrument created by Yasuski, sampled and processed in realtime through Kyma. Ed will also be using Camille Troillard's OSCulator software to communicate between the Jazz Mutant Lemur tablet and Kyma via Open Sound Control. Plus, you'll also be able to take in a bit of Eagan's visual style in the form of the new Continuum stand that he designed in partnership with industrial designer Sarah Dobbin. more...

Los Angeles, 14 Jan 2007 — You can participate in Phil Curtis' ongoing piece, Tracking Feldman starting at 4 pm Sunday afternoon, January 14, at the Dangerous Curve Gallery in downtown Los Angeles. This performance is a continuation of a sound installation Curtis first did in Fall 2006 at the Long Beach Sound Walk. Tracking Feldman is a hybrid performance/sound installation that invites the audience to participate in controlling computer-generated sounds. Audience members will be able to control sound processes through a Wacom tablet, a shuttle controller, and a virtual reality glove; they will also be able to send sound into the system via an audio input from either a radio or ipod. These various elements cross-modulate and interact in unpredictable ways with samples, filters, delays, noise, oscillators, and sundry other electronic music staples, in ways that develop and change over the course of the piece. more...

New York, 11 Jan 2007 — On Thursday, January 11th Lucibel Crater plays their first show of 2007, their first show as a trio, and their first show at Fat Baby, 112 Rivington St between Ludlow & Essex in New York (cost is $7 at the door). Go listen to Sarth Calhoun use his Kyma system to capture and process live acoustic sounds in non-obvious ways. more...

Rome, 17 Dec 2006 — U.S.O. - Unidentified Sound Object (aka Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi) has been selected among the most interesting electronic avant-garde artistic productions to perform @ Live!iXem 06. Federico will be on Mac and Matteo on PC as part of a marathon of live sets at the Live!iXem 06 festival/contest in Rome, which starts at 6:00 pm on Sunday December 17, 2006 at the Rialtosantambrogio, via S. Ambrogio n. 4. USO is scheduled to go on at around 1 am, and will be processing live input from acoustic bass and voice inputs and using the Wacom tablet as controller. more...

Prague, 15 Dec 2006 — Scott Miller was the featured composer at this year's Mlade Podium Festival in the Czech Republic, September 4th through the 14th. For a full program with photo gallery (including some live Dr. Seuss characters) visit their website. In addition to participating in panel discussions on new cultural developments in the US and the Czech Republic, the festival organizers also commissioned Miller to compose a new piece, Chimera No. 2, for violin and Kyma-generated electronics. more...

Seville, 14 Dec 2006 — On Thursday December 14th, Agostino Di Scipio spoke on "Mediation and Responsibility in Sound" at the International Congress on Music & Contemporary Technology in Seville. Di Scipio's "Craquelure (2 silent pieces, a Giuliano)" for synthetic sounds and room-dependent signal processing through Kyma was also performed during the congress. more...

New York, 04 Dec 2006 — Students in Joel Chadabe's electronic music course at Manhattan School of Music are presenting a concert of live electronics on Monday, December 4, 7:30 pm at Greenfield Hall, Manhattan School of Music, 122nd Street & Broadway. more...

Atlanta, 01 Dec 2006-06 Jan 2007 — The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA) announces LIGHT-SOUND INTERSECTIONS, Structure and Movement in Space and Time, to be held at MOCA GA Midtown from December 1, 2006 - January 6, 2007. LIGHT-SOUND INTERSECTIONS is an exhibition curated by Atlanta musician and composer, Dick Robinson. Using electroacoustic music that he composed from the 1970's to the present, Robinson has created a soundtrack to accompany an exhibition of artwork that he has selected from MOCA GA's permanent collection. The opening reception, featuring a concert of Robinson's most recent music (composed since 2005) will be on Friday, December 1, 2006 from 6:30 - 8:30 p.m. A second reception with concert is scheduled for Wednesday, December 13. Both performances are free to members, $5 for non-members.

One of the first composers to adopt the Kyma environment in his work, Robinson studied electronic music with Bob Moog and Hugh LeCain and founded the Atlanta Electronic Music Center in 1965. Robinson is also a professional violinist, having played with the Atlanta Symphony for 36 years before retiring in 1987 to devote his full time to composition. MOCA GA Midtown is located at 1447 Peachtree Street, two blocks north of the High Museum of Art. Museum hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. until 5 p.m and admission is free. For more information, call +1-404-881-1109, visit the website or send email to: info@mocaga.org more...

London, 27 Nov 2006 — For the second year running, Robert Jarvis has won the new media category of the British Composer Awards, this time for his installation Magic Stones.

Commissioned by the Millennium Court Arts Centre, in Portadown, N. Ireland, the work takes its inspiration from the South East corner of Lough Neagh and issues surrounding its ecological sustainability. The music, interspersed with comments from local resident Eddie Franklin, questions our relationship with the landscape, its musicality and the stories within it.

The award ceremony can be heard in full on BBC Radio 3 on Monday 27th November at 7:30 pm together with musical extracts and interviews with the winning composers. The broadcast will also be archived for seven days (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/performanceon3/pip/evy2j).

Both Magic Stones and last year's award winning composition, Disappear, can also be heard on Robert's latest CD. To listen to extracts or obtain further information please go to http://www.chameleonlectra.co.uk/MagicStones.html. more...

London, 24 Nov 2006 — Magic Stones - Robert Jarvis's sound installation for the Millennium Court Arts Centre in Portadown, Northern Ireland, has been selected as one of three finalists for this year's British Composer Awards in the New Media category. The awards will be presented at London's Hayward Gallery on 24th November and will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Monday 27 November at 7.30pm.

Inspired by the south east corner of Lough Neagh and its surrounding countryside, the Magic Stones installation takes its title from a listening game played by young visitors to the Portmore Nature Reserve who would be invited to take a 'magic stone', grasp it, and with their eyes closed see what they could hear. Jarvis's atmospheric score is composed from recordings taken from around the lough together with sections of an interview with local resident, Eddie Franklin. The layered sounds tell their own story of a countryside on the verge of change - an area being taken over by the 'progress' of our time. Magic Stones invites the listener to pause and to reconsider this relationship.

The composition can be heard on Robert's latest CD, released on the Motile label, together with other compositions inspired by time and place, including Disappear - winning work in the New Media category of last year's British Composer Awards.

CD information at: http://www.chameleonlectra.co.uk/MagicStones.html more...

Cologne, 03-05 Nov 2006 — Joel Chadabe's new Kyma piece One World was performed at Computer Music IV, a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Lejaren Hiller's historic collaboration with Leonard Isaacson at the University of Illinois, resulting in the Illiac Suite and Max Mathews' first synthetic sound generation experiments at Bell Labs. The festival took place from 3-5 November 2006 in Köln. more...

Evanston, 24 Oct 2006 — On Tuesday, October 24, Carla Scaletti and Kurt Hebel will be at Northwestern University to lecture on sound design in Kyma for students in Gary Kendall's music technology and sound design programs. more...

Brooklyn, 14 Oct 2006 — For upcoming live electronic performances by Lucibel Crater in and around New York, check their myspace page. It's live looping that doesn't sound like it! Recent performances were at the Living Room Lounge in Brooklyn on October 14th, and an almost-performance at the Brooklyn shipyard before the police shut down the event. more...

Paris, 08 Oct 2006 — "Vaporized orchestras" and "vocals morphing in embracing oceans" were heard in La Nuit Blanche, Lorenzo Brusci's Sonic Garden installation in Paris, 7-8 October 2006, Le Square Georges Caïn, Marais. Kyma was the main transfiguring tool. Find more information in the Current Event section of Giardino Sonoro. more...

New York, 07 Oct 2006 — Joel Chadabe's new piece One World will be premiered at 8 pm this Saturday on the Extended Worlds concert at the 3-Legged Dog Arts & Technology Center as part of Ear to the Earth, a unique festival of music sound art and ecology. Composers, sound artists and environmentalists are converging in Manhattan this Friday to explore perspectives on vanishing ecosystems through concerts, installations, public art, and panel discussions. Laurie Spiegel and Iannis Xenakis will also be featured on the festival. Chadabe used the CrossFilter, Vocoder, and FilterBank to treat city sounds and people recorded in New Dehli and New York, cross filtering them by each other as a metaphor for the linkages between the two cities. more...

Vienna and Berlin, 01, 15, 18, 22 Oct, 07 Nov 2006 — Experience one of Agostino Di Scipio's ecosystemic pieces this fall in Vienna or Berlin:

01 October 2006 VARIAZIONI SUL RITMO DEL VENTO, Kontrabass Blocklöte (Paetzold) mit Elektronik, ERPS biennale, Wien, Universität für Musik, Rennweg 8, 11:30 Elisabeth Haselberger, Kontrabass Blocklöte Petra Wurz, Klangregie

15, 18 & 22 October 2006 Galerie im Prater Berlin, Kastanienallee 7-9, 20:30 Gerd Lünenbürger, Kontrabass Blocklöte Martin Supper, Klangregie

07 November 2006 Unerhörte Musik, Berlin, BKA Mehringdamm 34, 20:30 Elisabeth Haselberger, Kontrabass Blocklöte Petra Wurz, Klangregie more...

Ekeren, 28 Sep 2006 — KaG (KunstarbeidersGezelschap), established in 2003 to bring contemporary music to Belgium, is sponsoring a series of three concerts starting on Thursday, 28 September, in the Ekerse Theaterzaal at 20.00. On the program are composers who know each other and have, in some manner, influenced one another. Among the featured composers is Kyma user Dirk Veulemans. more...

Philadelphia, 25 Sep 2006 — Howard Moscovitz is organizing the next Electro-Music 2007 Festival in Philadelphia (tentatively scheduled for June 1-3, 2007). For a taste of what Electro-Music festival is all about, check out the video. more...

Baton Rouge, 20 Sep 2006 — On September 20, the LSU Center for Computation and Technology and the LSU School of Music presented High Voltage: Cinema for the Ears, a concert of electronic and computer music, presented on ICAST, LSU's 24-channel surround audio theater, including works by composers Jonty Harrison, Brian Willkie and Stephen David Beck. The ICAST audio theater is a 24-channel speaker array, around, over and through the audience and will be featured during the upcoming International Computer Music Conference, this November in New Orleans. more...

Tokyo, 12-17 Sep 2006 — Yasushi Yoshida (Yasuski) was the sound engineer for a series of shows by live theater group Crome from September 12-17. Thirty minutes prior to each show, Yasuski did a "secret" live performance, performing Kyma controlled by the Continuum fingerboard from a position behind the audience seating area in "The Pocket" theater. During the show, he triggered and controlled special Kyma sound effects using the Continuum. more...

Vienna, 16 Jul 2006 & 27 Aug 2006 — This 10 day computer-assisted composition course offers classes and individual studio time in the Wiener Klangwerkstatt to explore the multidimensional space of sound and its use as the primary material of composition. In between new sonic experiences, you will have guided tours to sites in and around Vienna historically connected to the first and second Viennese school. Since it will be a small group (max. 6 students), you will benefit from lively Q&A situations. Technology has its own challenges for composers; find out what is congenial for you and work accordingly on a fully equiped Kyma Sound Design Station. For contact information, see http://www.brunoliberda.com. more...

Graz, 24 May 2006 — Cristian Vogel brought his Kyma system along for a live set he performed at SpringSix Festival in Graz for a crowd of about 800 people. SpringSix is the biggest festival for electronic art and music in Austria. Vogel writes "I think it performed well and sounded fantastic." You can hear his 60 minute improvisation with Kyma, Clavia G2 synth, Korg ESX1 drum computer and Serrato Scratch at http://www.no-future.com/erutufon/showthread.php?t=20266 more...

Sydney, 13 May 2006 — A recent concert at the Aurora festival, curated by Garth Paine, featured music for acoustic instruments and live electronic manipulation with Kyma.

The concert featured staff and postgraduate students from the School of Communication Arts and MARCS Auditory Lab at the University of Western Sydney, and occurred at Bankstown Arts Centre, Sydney on April 30 at 8:30 PM.

The concert will be broadcast on the ABC Classic FM at 10:30 PM (Australian Eastern Standard time) on Saturday 13 May 2006. (International listeners can can connect to a live audio stream.) more...

London, 30 Apr 2006 — Concert Perfomance featuring Paul Rutherford (Trombone), Robert Jarvis (Kyma) and Lawrence Casserley (MaxMSP).

Visionary and inexpressible, the work of Paul Rutherford with Robert Jarvis and Lawrence Casserley - who process the sound of trombone through computer manipulations - resists to any kind of classification, as the rotund phrasing by Rutherford is morphed into quasi-indeterminacy, but always within the borders of imperfect - better, mangled - raw beauty. -- Touching Extremes more...

Rye, 29 - 30 Apr & 06 - 07 May 2006 — A new sound installation by Kyma user Robert Jarvis will be featured at this year's East Sussex Wildlife Festival. Visitors to the installation are able to play on a new 'instrument' created specially for the occasion. The 'Keybird' makes use of a conventional piano keyboard of which every note is assigned to the call of a different bird. Depending on how the notes are pressed the birdsong is played back at different speeds and the room fills with moving birdsong. more...

new york, 27 Apr 2006 — audio - visual live performance. a singers voice is the gamete of acoustic and visual blossoms. with m.schwendtner, d. bruckmayr, m. strohmann more...

New York, 22 Apr 2006 — Richard Lainhart will demonstrate the Haken Audio Continuum controlling a Kyma system. Kyma users are invited to bring along their Sounds, Timelines, recordings, etc (either finished or in progress) and to present an explanation of their work for the edification of all.

The meeting is open to Kyma owners, users and students at all levels of experience, as well as any and all musicians interested in learning more about the Kyma System. more...

Dobbs Ferry, NY, 07 Apr 2006 — Tune in on Friday April 7th at 7pm, when Treavor Hastings will be joined by musical guest and good friend of the station, Richard Lainhart for his second solo performance at our studios. Lainhart has worked in the field of live interactive electronic performance for over 30 years, from the days of analog modular synthesizers and home-made instruments to the latest digital music technologies.

He will be performing some new compositions using his Kyma System, a digital playground for electronic musicians. He will also be chatting and bringing along some influential music from his library. It's always a pleasure to have him with us, so tune in and check it out! April 7th, at 7pm. more...

Venice, 24-26 Mar 2006 — Three Kyma users will be presenting talks at Matematica e Cultura 2006 in Venice, 24-26 March 2006: Metaphor in Mathematics and Sound by Carla Scaletti and Kurt Hebel, Mappatura sonica di un'area romana by Laura Tedeschini Lalli and Simple Mapping and the Aesthetic Dimension by Brian Evans. more...

Paris, 16-22 Mar 2006 — On the 16th through the 22nd of March 2006, following three days of lectures by composer Agostino Di Scipio, Kyma developers Carla Scaletti and Kurt Hebel will be presenting a week-long intensive course on composing for live performance using Kyma at The Center for the Creation of Music Iannis Xenakis, CCMIX. The Kyma week is part of a year-long course dealing with the creation of new musical forms based on sound itself. Inspired by the example of Iannis Xenakis, students are urged to find their own paths as composers by studying not just music, but also morphology, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, architecture, psychology, and other fields of interest to them. more...

Bari, 26 Feb 2006 — ERE/ImproBabele Trio Romolo Epifania – percussions and toys Marta Gadaleta – vocals Mimmo Galizia – live electronics

live set improvisation on eastern traditional chants loops, percussions and vocals manipulated by using Kyma. more...

San Francisco, 28 Jan 2006 — On January 28th at RECOMBINANT MEDIA LABS in San Francisco, Richard Devine joined forces with Trevor Wishart for a live performance in 16-channel surround sound. Devine, known for his layered and heavily processed sound, has a new release on Naut Humon's Asphodel/Schematic label entitled Asect / Desect. In true recombinant manner, Devine uses everything he can lay his hands on for sound design and music: "I use Cycling 74's Max/MSP and Pluggo, Logic Audio quite a bit, Reaktor, Supercollider, GRM Tools, CDP, Soundhack, Soundmaker, Bias Peak, Metasynth… Kyma... I always use everything, and keep my sound generation possibilities open." more...

Kyoto, 16 Dec 2005 — On December 16th, Yasuski performed with Kyma, Continuum, Mbiraski and traditional Japanese dancer Uho at the Sho Ren In temple on the north side of Temple Chi On In in Kyoto. Yasuski has built a portable version of his Mbiraski instrument that fits inside a U.S. Army first aid kit box, and even includes an extra input for an electric guitar or a second Mbiraski. A short video showing a one-handed performance on the instrument (he must have been using his other hand to hold the camera) is available here. It sounds very "acoustic" in the video and other recordings. You can hear Yasuski's latest Mbriaski + Continuum + Kyma recording here. Yasuski designed the sound by shaping noise with 2 sets of two formant filters to achieve a "glass harp" sound color. more...

Antwerp, 3-4 Dec 2005 — Agostino Di Scipio's Surface Impact Studies, commissioned by Champs d'Action, will be premiered December 3-4 at the Time Canvas Festival 2005: Music-Drawing, Drawing Music, in Antwerp, Belgium. This performance will consist of a live action painting by Rome-based Chilean artist Matias Guerra, with Agostino processing the sounds Matias creates by painting, scraping, and digging into the surface of wooden panels. In turn, Matias changes his actions in reaction to the sonic texture emerging from Agostino's processing. more...

Corfu, 02 Dec 2005 — Composer Bruno Liberda will be presenting a three-day seminar on "Composing with Kyma" at Ionian University in Corfu on December 2, 2005 for the composition students of Andreas Mniestris. more...

Salerno, 23 Nov 2005 — A 'lite' version of Carlos Alberto Augusto's Cine Lisboa will be performed on the opening concert of Sound and Music Computing 05 in Salerno, Italy on November 23, 2005. Agostino Di Scipio's 3 PEZZI MUTI (DALLA SUPERFICE AL FONDO) for piano and live Kyma signal processing is to be performed at the same concert and, later in the conference, Alvise Vidolin is presenting a talk on Live Electro-Acoustic Music Scoring and Sustainability. more...

Kyoto, 20 Nov 2005 — Yasuski has invented a new musical instrument: the Mbiraski intelligent thumb piano. He used a CAD system to fabricate the bridge and used titanium bicycle spokes for the blades. The spokes are affixed to the bridge by screws in order to allow the performer to easily retune the instrument. Piezoelectric sensors under the bridge detect the sound without extraneous noise.

Here's the sound of the Mbiraski alone: http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~yaski99/realaudio/mbiraski02.mp3

And here it is being performed through the AudioHologram: http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~MZ2Y-YSD/realaudio/mbiraski.mp3

Yasuski will be performing live on the Mbiraski, Kyma, and the Continuum fingerboard on November 20th at the Temple Myorenji Kyoto, starting at 14:30, in collaboration with Japanese traditional dancer Yuhoh. (For details, telephone:++075-451-3527) more...

San Francisco, CA, 18 Nov 2005 — In addition to Growling Mad Scientists & Shiva Space Technology playing psychedelic trance, new user Rob Rayle (Caldera) will attempt to somehow work the Kyma/Capybara he's had for about a month into a live chill set (1:30 - 3:30 AM in the chill room) more...

Milan, 18 Nov 2005 — In Milano, the Amici di Musica/Realtà and composer Agostino DiScipio will be premiering the first in a new series called 3 silent pieces on 18 November 2005. In this project, pianist Ciro Longobardi will be depressing the piano keys without allowing the hammer mechanism to hit the strings. The thin noise of fingers hitting on keys will be the main material; however, when he fails by depressing the keys too strongly and hitting the strings, Kyma will amplify and transform the pitched sound material into a denser texture, eventually masking the very thin key noises. The pianist then has to cope with the consequences of his mistakes, resorting to "security measures" in an attempt to shut the Kyma processing down — only then can he continue shifting along the keyboard "silently".

On November 23, the piece, 3 PEZZI MUTI (DALLA SUPERFICE AL FONDO), for piano and live electronics (adaptive processing, operated with Kyma, Ciro Longobardi, piano), will be performed again at the University of Salerno in the Teatro Campus Fisciano. more...

San Jose, 17 Nov 2005 — Electric Pacific 2005, a concert of music by Brian Belet, Eric Chasalow, Salvatore Martirano and others was performed on Thursday, November 17, 2005, at the San Jose State University Concert Hall. Concert admission is $12 ($8 students and seniors), with tickets available at the door. more...

Montpelier and Colchester, 11 & 12 Nov 2005 — John Mantegna's Chorale Variations for clarinet and live Kyma cross-filtering will be performed on November 11 in Montpelier, Vermont at the Unitarian Church, and on November 12 in Colchester, Vermont at the McCarthy Arts Center Recital Hall. Produced by the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble. Each concert in the Electric! series begins with a pre-concert discussion starting at 7:15 pm, followed by the concert at 8 pm. more...

Bari, 11,12,13 Nov 2005 — Throughout the month of November, Agostino DiScipio will be presenting master classes and concerts in Bari for the students of Francesco Scagliola:

November 11-12, Master Class at the Music Conservatory of Bari

November 13, Palazzo S. Giacomo, AUDIBLE ECOSYSTEMICS: Impulse Response Study (2002), Feedback Study (2003), Background Noise Study (2005), live-electronics solo (Kyma) more...

New York, 10 Nov 2005 — Phil Curtis will be using Kyma in an upcoming show in New York City with saxophonist/composer Earl Howard and soNu at Merkin Concert Hall on Thursday November 10 at 8 pm. The program of compositions and improvisations will include a new ensemble piece by Howard featuring soNu soprano Nina Eidsheim and guest baritone Thomas Buckner, and several new works by soNu members. Merkin Concert Hall is at the Abraham Goodman House, 129 West 67th Street. Tickets are $10. Contact the box office at +1-212-501-3330.

On November 18, Phil Curtis will be back in LA to perform as part of an ensemble with Wadada Leo Smith at the REDCAT theater. more...

Lunel, 29 Oct 2005 — John Paul Jones will be pushing the envelope at the Mandolines de Lunel Festival in Lunel, France on October 29, 2005 when he takes to the stage for a half hour solo set featuring JPJ playing his custom triple-neck mandolin routed through live 8-channel spectral processing, cross filtering, and multitrack looping in Kyma. more...

Kansas City and Beijing, 21 Oct 2005 — Composer Brian Belet's (Disturbed) Radiance for piano and Kyma, will be performed at the 2005 Electronic Music Midwest Festival in Kansas City, Missouri on October 21.

His composition [MUTE]ation, variations on a trombone mute realized within Kyma, will be performed in late October at the "Musicacoustic 2005: Mix" Festival in Beijing, China. more...

Los Angeles, 16 Oct 2005 — Phil Curtis will be utilizing Kyma in several upcoming performances with Earl Howard and soNu. Described by Anthony Braxton as "the music of the Third Millennium", soNu is committed to critically (re)examining and (re)conceptualizing improvisational forms and means with an eye toward the socio-cultural context of contemporary communities.

SoNu performed in Los Angeles with Earl Howard at Cafe Tropical on October 10, and they will be performing with him again at Half Hour From Home: CalArts Alumni at Barnsdall on Sunday October 16, 5:20 pm at the Barnsdall Art Park Theater, 4808 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles. Admission is free! more...

Eugene, 14 Oct 2005 — Jeff Stolet is the organizer of Electro-Acoustic Music: Arena for Action and Performance slated to take place at Future Music Oregon in Spring, 2006. Stolet has issued a call for musical works, papers, and panel discussions (see website), and will make a fully-loaded Kyma system with multi-channel playback system available for the festival. The deadline for receipt of submissions is Friday, October 14, 2005. Questions can be directed to Jeffrey Stolet via email at seamus06@uoregon.edu. more...

San José, 24 Sep 2005 — On Sept 24th at 8 pm, Dorsey Dunn will be performing with the Doublevision group at Works/San José in a new collaborative game piece entitled Evolutionary Patterns and the Lonely Owl. Incorporating dance, music and video, the piece derives its performance directions from an adaptation of John Conway's evolutionary model, the Game of Life. Dunn's instrument will be a video-controlled electronic sound device — essentially a drawing tool for sound. more...

Lisbon, 18-19 Sep 2005 — On 18 September at Musica Viva in Lisboa, Agostino Di Scipio's 2 Pezzi Muti su Hans Richter (1998) will be performed at the Auditório do Centro de Apoio Social de Oeiras starting at 10:00 pm. And on 19 September, also at 10:00 pm, his 5 Interazioni Cicliche Alle Differenze Sensibili (1997-98) for string quartet and room-dependent signal processing will be performed by the Quartetto Bernini with Di Scipio controlling the live Kyma signal processing. more...

San Francisco, 12,14,18 Sep 2005 — Dorsey Dunn provided the sound design for Adam Kenyon Venker's solo show Mayakovsky: The Yellow Tunic, part of the San Francisco Fringe Festival. The 40-minute play, based on the final days of Mayakovsky's life and directed by Vitali Kononov, ran on Sept 12, 14 and 18 at the Exit Theatre. more...

Berlin, 10 Sep 2005 — Kees Tazelaar will be using Kyma in conjunction with his lectures at the Technical University of Berlin where he as been invited to teach this semester as the Edgard Varèse Guest Professor.

In his 2004 eight-channel Lascia Vibrare, rhythmic impulse patterns gradually move in and out of phase with each other, setting up spatial patterns in the room due to slight random deviations. Over the course of 34 minutes, these simple impulses evolve into sinusoidal grains, and the tonal grains then evolve into complex cluster grains. Gradually, they take on more resonance, turn to glass, become more and more sustained, then turn brighter, cracklier and noisier, and conclude by approaching the sound of Tibetan bowls and bells. The title suggests the idea "Let it vibrate!" and the piece gives the impression of a large synthetic "I am sitting in a room" feedback system with Kees at the controls, attenuating or adding jitter when the feedback starts becoming too regular, feeding in new impulses when the original impulses have evolved into noise in the background. more...

Barcelona, 5-9 Sep 2005 — Barcelona will be overrun by computer musicians when it hosts the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) from 5-9 September 2005. Among the Kyma cognoscenti who will be there to present papers, projects, and music are Fred Szymanski, Thomas Ciufo, David Mooney, Steve Beck, Rod Berry, and Alvise Vidolin. Joel Chadabe and EMF are hosting a session on live interactive musical instruments, and the conference is highlighting The Free Sound Project, a database of Creative Commons licensed samples searchable by the Automatic Classification of Sound Effects engine, a collaboration between The Tape Gallery and the Music Technology Group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. more...

Chongqing, 01 Sep 2005 — For the whole of the month of September sound artist (and Kyma user) Robert Jarvis will be based in Chongqing, China, to create an installation for the opening of the city's new Museum at Chaotianmen Square.

Working in collaboration with a wide range of the Chongqingese, Jarvis will create a sonic response to the developing city and its relation to its inhabitants. Through a series of projects, people will contribute descriptions of their favourite sounds and these will form the basis of the material that Jarvis will work with to shape into the final art-piece. Projects arranged include a competition for people to submit descriptions of their favourite sounds (advertised on radio, in newspapers and an extensive poster campaign throughout the city) and an education project for school and university students.

The resulting work, to be launched on 30th September, will consist of the recorded sounds manipulated into a surround-sound composition and complemented with a visual element based on the sound descriptions. It will be on display until 31st December 2005.

It's the artist's intention to keep a dialy blog of the creation of the sound installation (internet access willing...) and this will be posted at: http://www.robertjarvis.blogspot.com more...

New York, 1 & 8 Sep 2005 — After a sleepy August, Lucibel Crater returns to nublu this Thursday, September 1st, and next Thursday, September 8th. Both shows, starting at 9 pm, will feature live looping with Kyma. No cover before 10 pm. more...

Seattle, 31 Aug 2005 — Marco D'Ambrosio did the sound design for the Experience Science Fiction Museum in Seattle where the motto is: "Most museums can show you history—only one takes you to the future." D'Ambrosio used Kyma for Globe, Transition Hall, and The Cities of Tomorrow. Check out the short-film festival and contemplate the future worlds defined by the choices we make today. more...

Siena, 8-29 Aug 2005 — Film composer Luis Bacalov (Il Postino) was assisted by Francesco Scagliola in this year's sound design and film composition master class at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana. Fifteen students worked under the direction of Bacalov and Scagliola on audio/video projects, using Kyma for sound design. more...

Oakland, 02 Aug 2005 — On August 2, The Bay Area International Arts Festival will feature a benefit concert at LoBot Gallery. Along with Beth Custer, Mobius Operandi, Nguyen Dance Company, and Sound Shack, Sean Clute and Dorsey Dunn will be doing an electronic set. Tickets are $5 - $25 sliding scale, and all proceeds go to offset Bayennale expenses. more...

Cologne, 01 Aug 2005 — Rob Acid will be one of the featured artists at the first 303 / Acid Exhibition this August 2005 in Cologne, Germany. more...

San Francisco, 29 Jul-Aug 18, 2005 — On July 29, 31; Aug 3, 18, Karl Gillick's The Thorn in the World's Side - Floating Forest will be performed at Theater Artaud in San Francisco. Sean Clute and Dorsey Dunn will be live-processing and resampling a four-piece acoustic band and otherwise filling the space with sound. Not recommended for those who get queasy watching others jump off heights. The show on the 29th is a free preview; after that, it's $15 - $25 sliding scale. Please check the website calendar. Most "Thorn" performances are 1 hour beginning at 9:30 pm and are preceded by other works. more...

Stanford, 21 Jul 2005 — Fred Malouf is using Kyma to process and supplement the sound of his guitar in a live performance at CCRMA's annual Digital Music Under the Stars on Thursday, July 21 2005 from 5 pm to midnight at the Frost Amphitheater. Bring a picnic basket and blankets, enjoy an early-evening set of original and cover bands, watch the sunset, and then explore the boundaries of live electroacoustic performances under a full moon. The Frost Amphitheater is located at the corner of Galvez Street and Campus Drive in Stanford, CA 94305. Admission (and the full moon) are FREE. more...

New York, 14 Jul 2005 — Lucibel Crater is performing in full color and sound this Thursday, July 14th at 9 pm at nublu, 62 Avenue C, between 4th & 5th St. No cover. Just walk into the blue light... more...

Lisbon, 11 Jul 2005 — Carlos Alberto Augusto's new piece, Cine-Lisboa (for Portuguese guitar and recordings of the Lisbon soundscape), will be included in a new DVD titled Lisboa.Reloaded to be released on July 12, 2005 as part of the 12th International Congress on Sound and Vibration in Lisbon. The Congress is open to the public and will include an entire session on acoustic ecology with keynote speaker R. Murray Schafer. For more background on Augusto's work, visit his website. more...

London, 03 Jul 2005 — The Royal Horticultural Society has awarded the Most Creative Garden prize to The Imaginary Pavilion of Love, a sonic garden by Lorenzo Brusci and colleagues. The environmental design team was also featured on BBC 2 television on Sunday July 3 at 18:00. more...

London, 02 Jul 2005 — Ambrose Field's new track for live electronics, NR, was broadcast on the BBC's Hear and Now radio program on the 2nd of July, 2005. In NR, Field uses Kyma to produce haunting, slowly evolving synthetic sound textures evocative of the real world around us. He designed Kyma Sounds to re-circulate simple materials through a series of spectral processes resulting in a shifting soundscape of urban emptiness. more...

Berlin, 01 Jul 2005 — In a concert on Friday, 1 July, 20:30 at TESLA in Berlin, Agostino Di Scipio will perform live Kyma works that evolve out of background noises in the performance place as well as small sounds produced in the mouth and throat. Also on the program is Tiresia, a chamber work developed with the poet Giuliano Mesa. The concert will include a live transmission by Nicolas Collins from a sound installation in the Parochialkirche. For further information send email to beirer.berlin@daad.de. more...

New York, 30 Jun 2005 — Immerse yourself in Sarth's perception-distorting Kyma grooves as Lucibel Crater performs at nublu this Thursday, June 30th at 9 pm in New York. Admission is free! more...

Berlin, 17 Jun - 3 July 2005 — An untitled interactive installation by Agostino Di Scipio is on display from 17 June through 3 July 2005 at the Daadgalerie, Zimmerstraße 90/91, 10117 Berlin. Di Scipio uses Kyma to energize a small open area with acoustic waves; microphones placed throughout the space provide both positive and negative feedback to his ecosystemic algorithms running on Kyma. The sound develops in real time, affected by visitors and the ambient background noise. more...

Florence, 14 Jun 2005 — On Tuesday June 14, a BBC crew directed by Lesley Orr shot some interviews and live footage at the Giardino Sonoro La Limonai dell'Imperialino in Firenze. Collaborators Lorenzo Brusci, Stefano Passerotti and Maurizio Geppetti are already at work on their next environmental design project, The Imaginary Pavilion of Love, scheduled for the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show in July 2005. more...

Cologne, 09 Jun 2005 — Agostino Di Scipio is presenting a Kyma workshop and a lecture/recital of his work in Cologne on June 9-10 2005. The lecture-recital, entitled Audible Ecosystemics is scheduled for Thursday, June 9, 2005, 19:00 at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM - Kunst Hochschule fur Media) in Cologne (visit website and click on Aktuelles). Audible Ecosystemics is a series of short live electronic solo works (and/or sound installations). Each work is the implementation of a real-time process that makes something audible to its surrounding environment and, in turn, is subject to what the latter (audibly) does to it.

On the following day (Friday, June 10, 2005, 10.30-17:00), Di Scipio will present a practical introduction to the Kyma sound design environment. Depending on the interests of the workshop participants, special attention will be given to the topics of micro-time sonic design, spectral manipulation, or feedback techniques. The Kyma/Capybara system in the Klanglabor will be available to workshop participants.

For more information on attending the concert and workshop, send email to studoffice@khm.de or to the workshop organizer, Martin Rumori. more...

Portadown, 07 Jun - 02 Jul 2005 — A soundscape composition / installation inspired by the south east corner of Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland. The work takes its title from a listening game played by young visitors to the Portmore Nature Reserve who would be invited to take a 'magic stone', grasp it, and with their eyes closed see what they could hear. In the moment of stillness offered to them, sounds that would usually be ignored would seep into their consciousness. As a result the players would become aware of not only the detail of those sounds surrounding them but also the wonder of them, and before long imaginations would run riot.... Jarvis's ghostly score is composed from recordings taken from around the lough together with sections of an interview with Aghalee resident, Eddie Franklin. The layered sounds tell their own story of a countryside on the verge of change - an area being taken over by the 'progress' of our time. 'Magic Stones' invites the listener to pause and to reconsider this relationship. more...

New York, 07 Jun 2005 — Music with laptops, composed, performed, and improvised, by a group of musicians associated in different ways with the NYU Music Technology program, among them Dinu Ghezzo, Tom Beyer, Robert Rowe, Langdon Crawford, Benjamin Chadabe, Richard Lainhart, and Steven Miller. This concert is an event in Hip Chips, EMF's worldwide laptop festival.

Richard Lainhart will be performing "One Word," a new performance piece for the Kyma System, using external MIDI faders to control the harmonics of a just-tuned chord generated by the Kyma in realtime. The Kyma's output is furthered modified by DSP processes running on the PowerBook. more...

Paris, 26 May 2005 — On Thursday 26 May 2005, Jean Philippe Calvin's Miserere Nobis was performed at the Eglise St. Etienne Du Mont at 30 Rue Descartes Paris 5e. The piece for large choir, children's choir, percussion and real-time electronics featured the composer as percussionist and Stefan Tiedje doing live electronics and was sponsored by CCMIX. more...

New York, 25 May - 17 July 2005 — Composer/filmmaker Fred Szymanski is one of the featured artists in What Sound Does a Color Make? at the Eyebeam Studio in New York, May 25 - July 16, 2005. Eyebeam is interested in the intersection of the arts and the sciences, and What Sound Does a Color Make? focuses on artists who use technology to collapse the boundaries between vision and sound. It is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by Independent Curators International. more...

New York, 23 May 2005 — Lucibel Crater, featuring Sarth generating live Kyma loops and processing, performed live at nublu in New York on Monday, May 23rd, 8:30 p.m. Lucibel played for 1 hour, followed by 2 sets of the nublu orchestra (@ 10 & 12) conducted by Butch Morris. more...

New York, 20 May 2005 — New York-based electro-pop band, Dual Agency, has an upcoming concert that showcases Kyma as a vocal processor. Band members Franky Mission (synthesizers) and Trevor Stokes (vocals) will perform their Kyma-manipulated vocals over synth-heavy, hyper-melodic walls of sound. They are performing on Friday May 20th 2005 at midnight at The Marquee (354 Bowery between Great Jones and E 4th St). Subway: B, D, R, and V to Broadway- Lafayette St. or 6 to Bleecker St. The admission price will be $5 (call The Marquee at +1-212-475-7621 for ticket info). more...

Vienna, 19 May 2005 — On the 19th of May, organist Marek Strbak will be performing compositions by Mozart, Beethoven and Franz Danksagmüller at St. Laurenz Church in Vienna. In Danksagmüller's piece, Machine Organ, sounds from the organ are captured live and then transformed, looped and otherwise transmogrified through Kyma. more...

Florence, 18 May 2005 — A crystal sonic Chandelier, focusing on a botanical carpet, EEM, Expressive and Environmental Modules and luminous, sonic and botanical features will be presented May 18 through May 22 at the Festival Nuovo e Utile, Fortezza Da Basso, Firenze, Italy. The Object Design is by Maurizio Geppetti/Eyes, the Acoustics Design is by Lorenzo Brusci /GSLI/Timet, Garden Design by Stefano Passerotti/GSLI, and the Sound Technician is Enzo Cimino/Timet. more...

Seattle, 11 May 2005 — Internationally acclaimed duo Correo Aereo team up with an ensemble cast of world class musicians to present this multimedia performance centered around the Amazonian Shipibo Konibo tribe. James Drage will use Kyma to process live vocals, mandolin and percussion instruments, as well as create soundscapes from field recordings. See website for performance schedule. more...

Istanbul, 10 May 2005 — On May 10, 2005, at 8 pm, in Is Sanat Hall, Agostino Di Scipio's CRAQUELURE (2 PEZZI SILENZIOSI, A GIULIANO) and PULSE CODE (ON WOOD) will be performed by percussionist Roland Auzet. For more background on Di Scipio's writings and music, see website for more information. more...

Valley Falls, 07 May 2005 — New and recent One Sound works for instruments, Apple Macintosh Powerbook and the Kyma interactive music system, composed and performed by Richard Lainhart. Lainhart has worked in the field of live interactive electronic performance for nearly 30 years, from the days of analog modular synthesizers and home-made instruments to the latest digital music technologies. His most recent instrumental works use the Powerbook and the Kyma System to transform the tonalities and timbres of each instrument into a single larger instrument or an ensemble of complementary instruments, creating music beyond the capabilities of a single performer. The program includes two pieces for electric guitar, two for grand piano with 9 E-Bows, and a new work for Kyma. more...

Florence, 7-8 May 2005 — Il Giardino Sonoro: La Limonaia dell'Imperialino (GSLI) is a sound garden created by a team of artists and landscape architects as an exploration of the borderline between artists and artisans. The organizers see it as the first step towards an unprecedented alliance between the world of production, the symbolic world, and the world of daily life. TIMET sound artists Lorenzo Brusci and Matteo Milani form part of a team creating EEMs (Expressive Environmental Modules—sonic, luminous, and botanic) for the installation which opens to the public on May 7-8, 2005 in Florence. more...

Gent, 28 Apr 2005 — You can hear a concert of works by composer Agostino Di Scipio at Tethraedon Hall in Gent on 28 April 2005 at 20:00, sponsored by the Logos Foundation. Included on the program are the pieces: CRAQUELURE (2 PEZZI MUTI, A GIULIANO) featuring room-dependent signal processing through Kyma, 6 STUDI (DALLA MUTA DISTESA DELLE COSE) for piano and adaptive signal processing through Kyma, ECOSISTEMICO UDIBILE, n.1 n.2 n.3 live and recorded Kyma synthesis and processing, PARIS. LA ROBOTIQUE DES LUMIERES for 8-channel tape, BOOK OF FLUTE DYNAMICS flute, adaptive signal processing through Kyma. All live electronics and sound diffusion will be performed by Agostino Di Scipio. more...

New York City, 25 Apr 2005 — Students in Joel Chadabe's electronic music seminar will present a concert of music using live performers, laptops and the Kyma system. This concert is an event in Hip Chips, EMF's worldwide laptop festival. more...

San Jose, 20 Apr 2005 — The annual Spring SJSU Composers Concert is scheduled for next Wednesday, April 20, at 7:30 pm at the SJSU Music Concert Hall and will conclude with a performance of Brian Belet's composition for electric bass and Kyma [BASS]ically Harmless. Other composers on the program include Wyman, Varah, Wirth, Furman, and Webern. more...

Sydney, 14 Apr 2005 — Garth Paine and Michael Atherton are launching the new MARCS Auditory Labs at the University of Western Sydney with a performance for electronics and live ancient asian percussion. more...

Muncie, Indiana, 14-16 Apr 2005 — Composer Mark Phillips is premiering a clarinet/tuba duo with Kyma-intensive accompaniment at the upcoming SEAMUS festival in Muncie, Indiana. Other Kyma users on the conference program include... more...

Venice, 02 Apr 2005 — On 2 April 2005 in the Sala Concerti at Conservatorio B. Marcello, Agostino Di Scipio presented a concert and workshop on his Audible Ecosystem compositions for the students of Alvise Vidolin. more...

Brooklyn, 30 Mar 2005 — Lucibel Crater invites you to to immerse yourself in an audiovisual environment of reactive objects and adaptive sonic elements where your words and movements become part of the music. Lucibel Crater and Sense Me—Collective Sound Pool Manipulations are performing their live Kyma alchemy on Wednesday, March 30th, 7:00-9:30 pm at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, New York. more...

Krems, 24 Mar 2005 — On March 24th, Franz Danksagmüller performed at the Donaufestival in Krems. Danksagmüller (organ and Continuum fingerboard) improvised with a guitarist, saxophonist and vocalist on the words of the the Russian poet Sofia Asgatowna Gubaidulina. Sax, guitar and voice were processed through Kyma, and Kyma was also used for granular synthesis and looping. According to Danksagmüller, it was a pleasure to be able to do all of these things with a single instrument and at such a high tonal quality. more...

Paris, 23 Mar 2005 — The Centre de Creation Musicale Iannis Xenakis (CCMIX) announces its annual 8-Month Course in Electronic Music. This course explores a compositional world where sound itself is the primary material. More information is available by email from Randall Neal, Director of Admissions: ccmix@vtlink.ne. more...

Baton Rouge, 14 Mar 2005 — At 6 pm on Monday March 14th, clarinetist/composer Roland Karnatz will present an entire recital of pieces for Kyma plus clarinet. Entitled Interactive Computer Music: A Performer's Guide to Issues Surrounding Kyma with Live Clarinet Input, the lecture/recital features music by Burton Beerman along with original music and pieces for "prepared clarinet" by Karnatz. Immediately following Karnatz' recital is a concert of electro-acoustic music entitled High Voltage. Both events are open to the public and are scheduled for the New Music Building Recital Hall of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. more...

New York, 11 Mar 2005 — a VERRRY free gathering of psychoactive music, dance, and telepathic orgasm branches. With: YOU, people who love YOU, and some very special elastic guests!

IanMetcalfe and AdamSobel will be performing a Kyma driven live set and there will be two other performers, one from Japan, and one from Denmark more...

Paris, 10 Mar 2005 — Composer Jean Philippe Calvin presented the premiere of his Miserere Nobis for mixed choir, electronic device and child soloists on 10 March 2005 at the Cité de la Musique in Paris. The third section, "Tuba Mirum," was created entirely in Kyma. The work will be performed again on 26 May 2005 at the Eglise St. Etienne du Mont, also in Paris. more...

Baton Rouge, 07 Mar 2005 — On March 7-8, 2005 Kyma designer Carla Scaletti has been invited to speak on the "effects of technology on human expression" at the Laboratory for Creative Arts & Technologies (LCAT) in Baton Rouge and to present seminars for Stephen Beck's composition students at Louisiana State University. more...

New York, 28 Feb 2005 — Joel Chadabe's Many Times Alejandro, for flute and Kyma, will be performed at New York University's Interactive Music Series on Monday, February 28 at Frederick Loewe Theater, 35 West 4th Street, New York City. The NYU Interactive Arts Performance Series, presented in collaboration with the Electronic Music Foundation, will feature Alejandro Escuer (flutist) and Antonio Camurri conducting the NYU New Music and Dance Ensemble performing music for instruments and electronics. The concert starts at 8 pm and admission is free. Further information is available by calling: +1-212-998-5441.

On December 18, 2004, Chadabe's Many Times Hui Mei, for flute and Kyma, was premiered by Hui Mei Chen at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris as part of New Mix, a two-evening festival in honor of the Electronic Music Foundation's 10th anniversary. (http://mapage.noos.fr/maatfrance/)

For more news on these performances and other electronic music-related events throughout the world, check out Chadabe's ArtsElectric website. more...

Paris, 24 Feb 2005 — The Centre de Creation Musicale Iannis Xenakis (CCMIX) announces its 11th annual summer session. The course will take place Monday, July 4th through Friday, July 29th, in Versailles (Paris), France. Faculty will include: Joel Chadabe; Trevor Wishart; Agostino de Scipio; Eduardo Reck Miranda and Gerard Pape. Individual studio work is at the heart of this program, and the CCMIX studio includes a Kyma system with 2 expansion cards. More information is available by email from Randall Neal at ccmix@vtlink.net. more...

Paris, 18 Feb 2005 — On Friday, February 18 at 20h30, Taylor Deupree performed at the Présences Festival, Salle Olivier Messiaen, Maison de Radio France, Paris. Deupree's music is described as "musical minimalism extended to 'microscopism'. Do less, listen more! http://www.ina.fr/grm/agenda/presences.fr.html more...

Minneapolis, 17 Feb 2005 — At the Spark Festival, Scott Miller related his work to Agostino Di Scipio's real time evolutionary systems in a talk entitled Audible-Mobiles: An Application of Eco-Systemic Programming in Kyma on February 17 2005 at the University of Minnesota, West Bank Campus. more...

Berlin, 31 Jan 2005 — Composer Agostino Di Scipio presented two workshops in Berlin January 31 and February 2-3 2005. In CONTROL-SIGNALS GENERATION AND PROCESSING UNDER REAL-TIME CONSTRAINTS: A COMPOSER'S PERSPECTIVE, presented at 10:00 in the TU Elektronisches Studio, Di Scipio raised the question of how a network of control-signals can be created in real-time based only on sound sources available in performance situations. He also discussed the mapping of control-signals to perceptually relevant sound synthesis and signal processing variables. His aim is to implement a fully automated array of sonic processes, capable of dynamical behavior and self-organization, reacting to changes in the input sound material. As a side-bar to the workshop, Di Scipio provided an overview of the Kyma sound design workstation and illustrated how Kyma is utilized in his AUDIBLE ECOSYSTEMICS live electronics solo compositions. more...

Los Angeles, 28 Jan 2005 — Rich O'Donnell played a 20 minute solo using Kyma and percussion instruments of his own invention at the Cal Arts Experimental music Festival CEAIT on January 28, 2005 at the REDCAT Auditorium in the new Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. O'Donnell describes Kyma as his "alter ego" during his performances in St. Louis and in various other cities on the east and west coasts. more...

Arezzo, 27 Jan 2005 — Tracks off two of Lorenzo Brusci's recent Mariposa CDs were broadcast on RAI Radio 3's Battiti program on January 27, 2005. Included were several tracks off the CD Metaorfosi di Canzoni Napoletane, a collaboration between Brusci and TIMET that was realized entirely in Kyma. more...

Osaka, 23 Jan 2005 — Yasuski's audioHologram is opening for the theatrical company Crome Molybdan at the Ohji Shougekijyou (the northern part central Tokyo) and at Osaka's Jungle 2 — a theater at the center of Osaka City. More information is available at the Crome Molybdan site. more...

Los Angeles, 20 Jan 2005 — Lippold Haken and Edmund Eagan will be demonstrating the Continuum Fingerboard at the NAMM show again this year, from January 20 to 23, at booth 1000, Anaheim Convention Centre, Anaheim, CA. They will be demonstrating several Continuum models in different configurations, including a full size Continuum used in conjunction with a Wacom Intuos3 tablet and a CM Labs Motor Mix, all controlling Kyma X.1. For more information about the Continuum, visit the Continuum page at Haken Audio. For more information about NAMM visit official show site. more...

Austin, Texas, 05 Dec 2004 — William Meadows in collaboration with Travis Weller created a new work featuring the Imbroglio String Quartet with live electronics.

Meadows used the Timeline to synchronize processes to Weller's graphical score. Kyma was used to smear, slice, granulate and diffuse sound through a four channel environment.

The work received a standing ovation. more...

St. Pölten, 28 Nov 2004 — Franz Danksagmüller has been asked to write special music for the Introit of the mass celebrating the enthroning of a new bishop at the Cathedral of St. Pölten in Austria. On November 28, 2004, the mass will be broadcast on TV, and Danksagmüller will be performing the music live on organ and Kyma, controlled by Continuum fingerboard. more...

Berlin, 25 Nov 2004 — A lecture illustrating a new paradigm for computer/human control systems: one in which the audio signal in a performance space controls the parameters of its own production. In Di Scipio compositions (as in biological ecosystems) large-scale structure evolves as an emergent property of simple rules for local interaction, feedback, and excitation by noise. Di Scipio composes the local rules; the evolution of the composition depends upon the live performer, the performance space, and ambient noise present in each unique performance. more...

Corfu, 22 Nov 2004 — At the invitation of Andreas Mniestris, Kyma developers Carla Scaletti and Kurt Hebel will be presenting a Kyma workshop at Ionian University in Greece from 22-24 November 2004. The workshop is open to visitors (reservations are required). For full details, please contact Professor Andreas Mniestris at andreas@ionio.gr. more...

Paris, 15 Nov 2004 — From the 15th through the 19th of November 2004, Kyma developers Carla Scaletti and Kurt Hebel will be presenting a week-long intensive course on the Kyma sound language, sound design, and composing for live performance at The Center for the Creation of Music Iannis Xenakis, CCMIX. The Kyma week is part of a year-long course dealing with the creation of new musical forms based on sound itself. Inspired by the example of Iannis Xenakis, students are urged to find their own paths as composers by studying not just music, but also morphology, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, architecture, psychology, and other fields of interest to them. more...

Amsterdam, 13 Nov 2004 — Het Zingende Oog (the singing eye) by Mendel Hardeman is a live performance for recorder, harpsichord, violone, two puppet theaters and five video cameras. Mathis Nitschke is taking the video output from the cameras, translating them into sound sources in Kyma (in parallel with their other job of delivering pictures to an array of TV-sets and a beamer), and processing them through matrixed cross-modulations and distortion. This is not an interpretation of the visuals; it's listening to the video signal directly as sound. Concerts are on 13 November at 20:30 and 14 November at 16:30 at De IJsbreker, Weesperzijde 23, Amsterdam. Reservations are highly recommended, since Het Zingende Oog is the final show in the famous De Ijsbreker which will close its current stage and move to the new Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam. more...

Paris, 10 Nov 2004 — 'PULSE CODE (on wood)' is a composition for wooden objects and adaptive signal processing (a complicated Kyma patch...). The premiére will be played by percussionist Roland Auzet. Auzet will play any wooden board found in the concert hall (could be the stage itself, if wooden), and 5 wood-blocks. Di Scipio plans on further works also called PULSE CODE, but 'on glass', 'on metal' and 'on paper'. The technological infrastructure should remain the same: the percussion part is conceived as an 'sound instruction code' (or 'sonic punch card'...). Features in the percussion performance(pulse rate, density of rolls, amplitude changes) set the computer's internal control variables, in a kind of 'sound-specific' approach to real-time DSP transformations: a change in the input sound determines a change in the way that sound will be processed. Also, in turn the percussionist has instructions to change his own playing nuances, depending on the computer sound output: a feedback loop is established (in the sub-audio domain), which implements a tight purely sonic interaction between performer and computer. In the same concert, Roland Auzet also plays music by Gerard Pape and Sinan Bokesoy. more...

Canterbury, 04 Nov 2004 — Robert Jarvis' current installation has another two public presentations before the end of the year. The work, entitled Disappear, aims to focus listeners' attention on the transient nature of the soundscape and will be showing at the Arts Alive Mole Valley Arts Festival between the 16th and 30th October, and the Royal Museum & Art Gallery in Canterbury from 4th November to 2nd December. more...

Milan, 31 Oct 2004 — On 31 October 2004 from midnight until dawn in Milan's Cinema Teatro Gnomo, Belfagor: fantasmi allo gnomo featured Halloween films, music, and cartoons with live performances by Walter Prati and friends, featuring special guest Elliott Sharp. For full information, visit the web site. more...

Seattle, 30 Oct 2004 — James Drage used his Kyma system with the SIL2K group to process eight vocalists for a version of Cardew's "The Great Learning" (paragraph 7). It aired live on the radio on KEXP's Sonarchy programme on Saturday October 30th (streaming archive available at http://www.kexp.org). more...

Breda, 29 Oct 2004 — A musical and visual brainwave for travellers featuring the innovations of Frank van der Kooij (Baritone & Tenor Saxophones through various electronica), Robert Jarvis (Trombone, Kyma & Continuum Fingerboard), Michel Banabila (Laptop & synth) and Olga Mink (Video manipulations). more...

Paris, 20 Oct 2004 — Joel Chadabe will present the keynote lecture on the history of interactivity with computers at Resonances 2004 "Sound and Music Computing" conference at IRCAM in Paris, October 20-22, 2004. As part of the keynote, Chadabe will present an excerpt from his composition Many Times ... in a version for flute and Kyma system.

On December 16 and 17, 2004, Chadabe's Many Times... will be performed as part of a two-day concert event at Le Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

This is also the 10th anniversary year of the founding of Chadabe's Electronic Music Foundation and there are lots of celebratory performances, installations, projects, concerts and parties planned. For full details on what's going on and how you can participate, see the EMF web site. more...

Donaueschinger, 16 Oct 2004 — In the premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Sonntag aus Licht on October 16th at the Donaueschinger Musiktage Festival, Kyma was used for live ring-modulation of the trumpet and flute. Stefan Tiedje of CCMIX programmed the Kyma Sounds and set up the Capybara at Stockhausen's studio in Kürten so he could work with it during the period of May to October of this year. In the opera, musical shapes are played in and out of phase with each other at increasing and decreasing time intervals: first for the Bassett horn with flute and then for tenor with trumpet. Both pairs meet occasionally at time zero. These temporal phase shifts are repeated at the microsound level through the use of ring modulation. For Stockhausen, the sum and difference tones of double ring modulation are like the reflections of a "magic mirror" generating new harmonies and tonal qualities. more...

Kyusyu-Island, 12 Oct 2004 — Yasuski performed "Genji Tales" in the countryside of Japan (Yufuin on Kyusyu-Island) at a museum that has a small stage for traditional Japanese doll theater. To make things more exciting for the outdoor gig, it rained every day and a typhoon hit Japan around the same time. Nevertheless, the gig was finished successfully under better conditions. Here's a photo report from Yasuski's blog: http://blog.livedoor.jp/channel_D/archives/7952928.html. more...

St. Pölten, 02 Oct 2004 — On 2 October, Franz Danksagmüller played a concert using organ and Kyma at the Cathedral of St. Pölten with saxophonist Renald Deppe (http://www.porgy.at), a guitarist, a narrator, and a dancer. The saxophone was processed with Kyma-loops and granulation. Bodo Hell (http://www.literaturhaus.at/buch/buch/rez/hellsax/bio.html) wrote and performed a text concerning Abraham's sacrifice (Genesis 22). The concert was recorded by the ORF (the Austrian Broadcast Company). more...

Lunel, Barcelona and Zaragoza, 06 Sep 2004 — David Mooney's piece WMD: Naming Names was performed at the Zeppelin 2004 convocation On Agreement and Conflict, Barcelona, May 19-22. The event will be repeated in Zaragoza in September 2004. WMD: Naming Names answers the question, "Where are the weapons of mass destruction?" by listing the names of all acknowledged nuclear explosions detonated since 1945. more...

Sevenoaks, Kent, 04 Sep - 09 Oct 2004 — A surround sound installation composed using sounds that have either disappeared or are close to extinction. During 2003, the artist, Robert Jarvis, responded to the replies to about 500 'Wanted - Endangered Sounds' posters that he put up around Kent (in the southeast of England) recording the sounds, and then manipulating and scoring them using Kyma. Visitors to the installation walk over a 'carpet' listing an array of endangered sounds and into the midst of the surround composition. The work aims to draw the listeners' attention to the transient nature of aspects of our soundscape and invites them to (re)consider their relationship to it. more...

Vigevano, 04 Sep 2004 — Ambrose Field's Being Dufay is a multichannel surround work featuring Kyma's spectral processing of the amazing voice of John Potter (whose credits include the Hilliard Ensemble and Electric Phoenix). Commissioned by the Taga Foundation, the work was premiered in Vigevano, Italy at the VoceVersa Festival 4-12 September 2004. VoceVersa is dedicated to the human voice as the fundamental instrument of communication. The goal of the festival is to make "high culture" alive and accessible to a wider public in search of stimulating ideas. more...

vienna, 26 Aug 2004 — MEET... 5 ANGRY NAZI BEARS, BUSTER KEATON, EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE, A SUNKEN DIVA in A DELICATE SITUATION

A blind and a deaf are together in a dark room. Can they ever meet each other?

How does it work? It doesn't. That's the beauty of it.

Komposition: Michael Strohmann, Mathias Gmachl, Günther Rabl, Josef Linschinger; PerformerInnen: Irene Coticchio, Elisabeth Löffler, Daniel Aschwanden, Anna Mendelssohn, Christian Felber; Raum: Yosi Wanunu + Johannes Hoffmann; Sound: Michael Strohmann; Konzept und Regie: Yosi Wanunu; Produktion: Kornelia Kilga more...

Berkeley, 02 Aug 2004 — Sound designer and author Dorsey Dunn has been performing saxophone processed live through Kyma in Berkeley and other cities. Check out the new track at his website: http://www.itinerantstudio.com/mp3s/concert.mp3. more...

Williamsburg, 31 Jul 2004 — Sarth Calhoun played live with Kyma on Saturday night (July 31, 2004) at Laila Lounge in Williamsburg. Performing with Sarth were: Leah Coloff (cello/vocals), Andrew Green (guitar, bass), supported by live video and processing by Gregory Kage. Sarth played downstairs (there's also an upstairs with a DJ and a garden). more...

Mainz, 25 Jul 2004 — Study with experimental live interactive sound composer (and Kyma user) Agostino Di Scipio this summer during a week-long seminar. Beyond Aesthetics. Performance, Media, and Cultural Studies will take place from 25 July to 7 August 2004 and encourages interdisciplinary perspectives through seminars such as "Media and Body," "Transformation of Bodies," "Media and Cultural Studies," and "Crises of Mimesis." There are 13 "full stipends" (travel, accommodation, meals and extra fees) available! See the web site for details and online application. more...

Hythe, 09 Jul 2004 — An intergenerational performance for nine trained dancers and their relations. This is the result of a collaboration between sound artist Robert Jarvis, choreographer Jamie Watton and video artist, Ben Johnson. The installation style happening takes as its inspiration the fragility of our everyday relationships and features an improvised surround sound score together with video manipulations and multiprojections of the movement. more...

Tokyo, 08 Jul 2004 — Yasuski performed live with his audioHologram system in Tokyo with theatre group Crome Molybdan at the Ohji Shougekijyou in north-central Tokyo. On July 8-12 2004, Yasuski opened for the experimental theatre group's performance based on the story of cell phones (personified as female actors who sing the ring tones) and the lonely men who own them. To hear some of Yasuski's performance, visit http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~yaski99/realaudio/ and locate the files called TokyoLive. more...

Siena, 01 Jul 2004 — Francesco Scagliola used Kyma to do the sound projection for a new opera by Azio Corghi-¿Pia? premiered during July 2004 at the Teatro dei Rozzi in Siena. The opera was also broadcast on RAI-3.

Scagliola also taught Kyma last summer in a music for film course at the Accademia Chigiana, assisting Academy Award winning composer Luis Bacalov (Il Postino). more...

Berlin, 27 Jun 2004 — The Festival Inventionen, in Berlin, this year features Agostino Di Scipio (DAAD resident artist) performing live with Kyma, presenting his room-dependent live electronics solo pieces AUDIBLE ECOSYSTEMICS n.1 (Impulse Response Study) and n.2 (Feedback Study). more...

Barcelona, 17 Jun 2004 — Sofus Forsberg performed live with vocalist Henriette Sennenvaldt from "Under Byen" (http://www.underbyen.dk) at the Jenka Music Showcase in Barcelona on Thursday, 17 June 2004 as part of the Sonar Festival (see photo report at http://www.sonar.es/2004/eng/noticias.cfm?id_noticia=34). Forsberg's full complement of sound sources included: vocals, melodica, glockenspiel, 2 laptops, MOTU828mkII, Capybara320, CM Labs Motor Mix, and a Kaosspad II. As Sofus describes it: Henriette has a very delicate breathy voice which I put through some of the various granular cloud things. And also I would use the looper Sounds. I think Kyma is really great for the more abstract sounds and it's great to improvise with. Sometimes I would sample a loop on the Kaosspad then into Kyma. The glockenspiel through some of the granular cloud things.... Very beautiful. I also used some of the live time stretch stuff. more...

Capezzana, 16 Jun 2004 — On 16 June 2004, Lorenzo Brusci (TIMET) won a silver medal from the Royal Horticultural Society for his SONIC TUSCAN KITCHEN GARDEN (http://www.timet.org/events/orto.htm). TIMET and Florentine landscape architect Stefano Passerotti were invited by the Society to install a version of their sonic garden at the 2004 garden show in Birmingham (16-20 June 2004). Entitled Orto Abitato, this garden-plus-underground-sound-system resonates with the sounds of everyday family life: the sounds, the conversations and the popular songs. Sounds are diffused by sonic objects, designed coherently with the shapes and meaning of the garden itself, so the sound is acoustically and electronically integrated into the botanical world.

Brusci's underground sound system finds another application in Capezzana, at the winery Barco Reale di Capezzana. In celebration of the winery's 12th century of operation, Brusci created sonic rose fields and Kyma-processed Gregorian chants in the wine cellars. For more news from Brusci's fertile imagination, check out the TIMET website. more...

Bourges, 05 and 10 Jun 2004 — The Festival Synthése, in Bourges, presents the premiere of Agostino Di Scipio's full set of 3 PAYSAGES HISTORIQUES, multichannel tape pieces:

1) Rome, Cantor Set (1998, commission of Goethe Institut, Rome), 7'40"

2) Berlin, Bad Sampling (2000, invitation of Frankfurt Radio), 2'10"

3) Paris, La Robotique des Lumiéres (2003, commission of IMEB, Bourges), 14'07".

Another concert in the same festival, June 10th, includes the live performance of OS ORIS, for trombone (Michele Lomuto) and live electronics (Francesco Scagliola).

more...

The Hague, 04 Jun 2004 — Hector Benard will be premiering a new piece for contrabass flute and live Kyma processing (Dominy Clements flautist) as part of the opening reception for the GIANTS sculpture exhibition in The Hague on 4 June. Princess Máxima will dedicate the sculpture exhibition entitled GIGANTEN - Europese Spraakmakers (GIANTS - European conversation pieces) on Lange Voorhout, The Hague. GIGANTEN is the 2004 manifestation of Den Haag Sculptuur, an annual open-air sculpture exhibition based, this year, on the theme of EU enlargement. All summer, the public will be able to enjoy giant sculptures by leading artists from 25 European countries. more...

Los Angeles, 15 May 2004 — The LA Live! performance series is four evenings of literature, dance, music, and theatre presented in conjunction with the LA: Light/Motion/Dreams exhibition at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles This Saturday's (May 15 2004) performance begins at 8 pm at the Jean Delacour Auditorium and will feature music, imagery and performance from host Jason Bentley (KCRW, Machine Head), Stephen Dewey and Tobias Enhus (Machine Head), Joe Frank, The Supernova String Quartet, Thomas Golumbic, Cut Chemist and the art of Bill Athaway. Stephen Dewey is performing his spoken music piece I live in LA, and Tobias Enhus is processing and mixing the entire performance through Kyma with the Radio Baton as the only controller. Tobias processes Stephen's voice to create various characters and melodies, while the string quartet generates the fabric for a Kyma-processed ambience. Five of the inputs and all eight of the audio outputs on the Capybara will be utilized for this performance. more...

Rome, 10 May 2004 — 5 DIFFERENCE-SENSITIVE INTERACTIONS, for string quartet with Kyma room-dependent signal processing (composed in 1997-98 upon commission of CEMAT), is performed in the RAI (Italian National TV & Radio Network) studios in Rome, and broadcast by RAI Radio3. The Bernini String Quartet will also perform works by other Italian composers, including Alessandro Cipriani, Salvatore Sciarrino and others. more...

Ghent, 08 May 2004 — On May 8th 2004, Dirk Veulemans will be using Kyma for live vocal processing as part of the 5th anniversary celebration of the SMAK Museum in Ghent, Belgium. One of the items on the program will be a John Cage happening staged by the Spectra Ensemble (http://www.spectraensemble.com/hoofddocumenten/index2.htm) in which pieces from Cage's Song Books Volume I will be performed with voice and live electronics. more...

Whitstable, Kent, 05 May - 12 June 2004 — A surround sound installation utilising what the artist is calling 'endangered sounds', i.e., those sounds which might disappear in the next ten or twent years. Visitors to the installation walk over a 'carpet' of over 200 endangered sounds and are immersed in a surround sound composition utilising 40 of the sounds, travelling around and through the listener: The work is fundamentally concerned with a reconsideration of how we relate to our changing sonic environment and was funded by the Arts Council of England. more...

Florence, 01 May 2004 -- 22 May 2004 — La Limonaia dell'Imperialino, Firenze will be the outdoor site for Stefano Passerotti and Lorenzo Brusci's Sonic Garden Lab from the 1st through 22nd of May 2004, Firenze. Works by several sound artists, including Matteo Milani and Lorenzo Brusci, will be installed in the garden located at Viale Poggio Imperiale 23 in Firenze. During the month of May, you can go on guided visits on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 10 am to 5 pm. more...

Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, 26 Apr 2004 — Through sheer serendipity, the last week of April 2004 is shaping up to be "live Kyma week" at the University of Illinois in Urbana/Champaign. On Monday April 26, guest composer Steve Everett's Rendezvous IV for violin and Kyma will receive its premiere performance at 7:30 pm in the Music Building Auditorium. On Tuesday at 5 pm, Everett will present a Composers' Forum lecture on his work.

Then, on Wednesday, guest composer/pianist Janis Mercer will be presenting a concert of new works for piano at 7:30 pm in the Colwell Playhouse Theatre at the Krannert Center; included on that program is Disturbed Radiance for piano and live Kyma interaction by Brian Belet. The theme of live Kyma interaction continues into the next evening's concert by the New Music Ensemble (also at the Colwell Playhouse Theatre and also starting at 7:30 pm).

Thursday evening's performance at the Colwell Playhouse features composer-in-residence Agostino Di Scipio's Natura allo Specchio for two percussionists, interactive signal processing through Kyma, and 8-track digital tape. more...

Naples, 20 Apr 2004 — Lorenzo Brusci and Mariposa will be performing Metamorfosi di canzoni napoletane at Teatro Sancarluccio (http://www.teatrosancarluccio.com/) in Naples on the 20th of April 2004 as part of the EVENTI KONSEQUENZ curated by Girolamo de Simone. Konsequenz (http://www.konsequenz.it), a journal and website devoted to discourse on the melting-pot of contemporary art, is sponsoring a series of concerts featuring "borderline composers" who are not as well-known as they ought to be. Half an hour before the start of every concert, the lights will go out and the audience will be treated to rare remixes derived exclusively from the Konsequenz archives, including Brusci's metamorphoses of Neapolitan songs (which he describes as Electronic Metacompositions). more...

Antwerp, 18 Apr 2004 — The Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpe (http://www.muhka.be/) will be transformed into a Cage "happening" from 14:00 to 17:00 on April 18 2004. Several of Cage's solo pieces and songs from Song Books Volume I will be performed by the Spectra Ensemble in various spaces throughout the museum. Dirk Veulemans will be doing live processing of voices through Kyma. more...

Lausanne, 17 Apr 2004 — The Harmoniques festival (April 15-18, 2004) is usually devoted to early music and early music instruments. This year, the program has been extended to include electronic and computer music. They commissioned Agostino Di Scipio to compose a new work for string quartet, sub-kontrabass recorder, bassoon and Kyma-operated interactive signal processing, 'Esquisses de Surveillance et de Controle' (reference to the current international policies in 'security' is not unintended...). Performers include the Sine Nomine string quartet, Antonio Politano (on the enormous sub-kontrabass recorder), and bassoonist Pascal Gallois. The prémiere will take place on April 17th. In the performance, the sound of the wind duo controls and drives the computer-processing of the string quartet, and vice-versa, the string quartet controls and drives the computer-processing of the wind duo. Two more works by Di Scipio are featured in the festival programme, on the 17th and 18th of April, 'Variations on the Rhythm of the Wind' (for contrabass recorder and Kyma, 1995), and 'Due di Uno' (for violin, piccolo recorder and Kyma, 2002), with Politano on recorders, and Haesung Choe on violin. Other titles include Luigi Nono's 'La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura', for violin and 8-channel tape, the prémiere of Horacio Vaggione's 'Taleas', for recorder and tape, and more. The festival programme can be downloaded from the Harmoniques website. more...

Paris, 17 Apr 2004 — Taylor Deupree has a busy touring schedule this spring, and he's bringing his Kyma system along for live synthesis and processing. Last month he performed in Rome and Madrid (where he added a short piece in response to the bombing that had just occurred the night before the gig). On April 17, he's performing with Mitchell Akiyama as part of the Confluences Festival in Paris (http://www.confluences.net/avrildot/index.htm). In May, he is scheduled to perform in Boston, and in June he'll be doing a tour of Japan. Taylor is also using Kyma to do sound design for an installation at the YCAM Museum. (No, that's not some kind of twisted anagram for Kyma—see http://www.ycam.jp/). more...

Barcelona, 15 Apr 2004 — Sound artist Norbert Oldani's piece Isaiah Said... has been accepted for Zèppelin2004: ON AGREEMENT AND CONFLICT (sponsored by Sonoscop (http://ocaos.cccb.org/). This year's festival in Barcelona is focusing on audio material related to situations of conflict and consensus in human society.  Sound pieces from around the world expressing a rejection of armed conflict are to be played back on a high-quality, 8-speaker system in the CCCB Hall area between the 19th and the 22nd of May 2004, so that individual pieces will be played back at various times during the festival. Works can be submitted for possible inclusion in the festival through the 20th of April 2004.

A setting of the well-known quote, "they will beat their swords into plowshares," Oldani's Isaiah Said... includes Kyma granulation textures and a Shaker hymn (among other things). more...

Sydney, 08 Apr 2004 — DIS_OR_IENTATION

Presented by the UTS Sound Collective and supported by 2SER, 2MBS, 2RRR, Bondi Intermusic and Lanfranchis.

Disorientation is a monthly night of electronic audio-visual performance at Lanfranchis Memorial Discotheque in Chippendale. The event aims to present innovative work by both established and emerging electronic artists while simultaneously expanding the audience for such work.

This month Disorientation features:

Garth Paine

Garth Paine is particularly fascinated with sound as an exhibitable object. This passion has led to the creation of several interactive responsive environments where the inhabitant generates the sonic landscape through their presence and behaviour. It has also led to a considerable body of work that creates music scores for dance in real-time using video tracking of the choreography.

He has an international reputation as a leader in the area of interactive sound works and has exhibited/performed extensively in Asia, UK, Europe, USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. As a composer he has produced original compositions and sound designs for film, theatre, dance and installation works. more...

New York, NY, 02 Apr 2004 — Harpist Asuncion Claro and composer Lars Graugaard, from Denmark, have a concert of new music for harp & electronics, for the New York section of the ISCM (Int'l Society of Contemporary Music). Among the works presented, is Agostino Di Scipio's composition 'Some Strings Cry, Some Strings Quiet', composed in 1993 when he was in residence at Simon Fraser University, near Vancouver. While this piece was composed prior to Agostino's experience with Kyma (for the tape, he used Truax's POD system, and his own custom routines running on the POD's platform, based at that time on the older VAX computer + DMX1000 DSP), it clearly shows why Agostino then moved to Kyma as the platform for his later instrument(s)+live electronics works. Other composers in the concert program are: Lars Graugaard, Ake Parmerud, Fernando Garcia, and Takyukai Rai. more...

Oakland, 02 Apr 2004 — Dorsey Dunn premiered his new piece for prepared piano, alto saxophone, and Kyma processing as part of the annual Signal Flow Mixed-media Festival at 8 pm Friday, April 2, 2004, at Mills College Concert Hall in Oakland. The collaboration (featuring composer/saxophonist Dunn and Lithuanian composer and pianist Vitas Germanavicius) will be touring later in the year, so if you live in Los Angeles, New York, Amsterdam or Berlin (or enjoy visiting those places), you may be able to catch additional performances of the work in the coming months. (Watch for announcements at http://www.itinerantstudio.com.) more...

Kyoto, 06 Mar 2004 — Yasuski will be performing live in his audioHologram surround-sound setup in a performance featuring live electric guitar, kora, Kyma, traditional Japanese dance, and an ancient Japanese soap opera. more...

Walton on Thames, Surrey, KT12 2NZ, 25 Feb 2004 — Our surroundings are changing fast. It's easy to see: from never-ending roadworks to the rise of the megastore. But the story does not end there... Our soundscape is changing as well. As traffic noise increases, peace and quiet is quickly becoming a thing of the past. From the clanking of milk bottles to the whirring of old cash registers, sounds are disappearing...

Robert Jarvis' new work takes the form of a surround surround installation utilising what the artist is calling 'endangered sounds'. It is fundamentally concerned with a reconsideration of how we relate to our changing sonic environment. The work was created using Kyma and makes use of granulation, filtering and lots of spatialisation. more...

Athens, OHIO, 18 Feb 2004 — Composer MarkPhillips premiered a massive 50 minute work for orchestra, jazz band, Kyma, and video, with modern dance to commemorate the bicentennial anniversary of the founding of Ohio University. The first performance took place at 8 PM on Wednesday, February 18, 2004 Templeton-Blackburn Memorial Auditorium Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. more...

Kleve, 25 Jan 2004 — FlorianWittenburg uses Kyma to do sound engineering for a Theremin recital. more...

London, 17 Jan 2004 — John Paul Jones, armed with his 12-string bass and Capybara, will join 200 to 300 other musicians scattered throughout the Barbican performing arts center in London to recreate John Cage's Musicircus event. Armed with a stopwatch and an I-Ching-generated score each musician can play whatever they want (just not whenever they want). Was Cage saying something of our potential as individuals within a society? Was he anticipating the fractionalization of musical genres and the cacaphony of the information age? Was he saying that everything we do is music? Or was it just something fun to do in the Stock Pavillion in Champaign Illinois back in 1967 when the piece was premiered? You can experience the answer for yourself when members of the BBC Symphony Chorus, the Cat & Fiddle Band, COMA Ensemble, The Electroacoustic Cabaret, Irish folk fiddlers, young musicians from local schools, GSMD and TCM and other musicians take to every corner of the Barbican to recreate the experience of a 60s happening in 21st century London.

3.00 pm Barbican Foyers Musicircus

4.00 pm and 4.35 pm Talk Prompt Corner John Cage and the Musiccircus

Composer Stephen Montague discusses Cage's Musicircus. (Please note that due to space limitations, the 4.00 pm talk is open to weekend Pass-holders only).

The 4.35 pm talk is open to all ticket holders for Cage events, but please note that space is limited.

5.00 pm Barbican Foyers Musicircus

A repeat performance. Or will it be? Can anything ever be the same twice? more...

Anaheim, 15 Jan 2004 — NAMM is the world’s largest trade-only music products show. Kyma and the Capybara will be featured in association with the HakenAudio booth at the Jan 15-18 2004 tradeshow in Anaheim. For more information visit http://www.cerlsoundgroup.org/Continuum/. more...

St. Pölten, 14 Jan 2004 — Danksagmüller composed and performed a new sound track for the silent film classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. more...

Chicago, 06 Dec 2003 — Fund raising benefit at Empty Bottle for local Chicago educational not for profit, Chicago Image Group. Chicago Image Group Mission statement can be read at http://www.coopimage.org.

Gashoagie, a local Chicago multimedia group will be representing SYM.Sound with a capy 320 in their arsenal. more...

Ascoli, 28 Nov 2003 — Using the myth of Daedalus as a metaphor for humanity's drive towards cyborgian self-modification (and the ultimate renunciation of physicality), composer Maurizio Squillante has created a shockingly beautiful opera for our times. Premiered in Ascoli Picena at the Ventidio Basso Theatre with an international cast of five singers, one actor and four dancers, the opera expresses these concepts through an innovative libretto, daring staging, the use of cutting-edge technologies, compositional techniques, and vocal interpretations to signal the advent of the "Cyborg era." more...

Paris, 26 Nov 2003 — World Premier of a new La Monte Young piece for cello and live electronics. more...

Sandgate, nr Hythe, 25 Nov 2003 — Three new pieces for dance: - PUNK28, MEASURE and LOVELY BONES: for Kyma, piano, trombone, voice and ping pong balls. Music composed as part of Robert Jarvis' placement at Brockhill Park School as artist in residence. more...

San Jose, 06 Nov 2003 — A concert of electro-acoustic music, presented in conjunction with the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States' [SEAMUS] annual Electro-Acoustic Music Month celebration (November 2003), a nationwide production of American music composed for and performed by electronic and acoustic media.

Kyma compositions (live and pre-set) by B Belet, C Scaletti, J Stolet, Dick Robinson, R Fridriksson, and S Everett. more...

Alfortville (Paris), 03 Nov 2003 — Carla Scaletti will present a week-long course on Kyma for the students enrolled in the annual CCMIX course. more...

Bruxelles, 01 Nov 2003 — Robert Jarvis has used Kyma to create a series of (eighteen) jingles for Belgium's RADIOPHON' iC Festival between the 1st and 8th November which will be broadcasting experimental music and events via radio (88.8 fm) to an unsuspecting Belgium public. For more information, go to http://www.radiophonic.org. more...

London, 01 Nov 2003 — Two sessions: the first one is for people who haven't seen a Kyma demo before; the second is for people who've seen a demo and would like to see what's new in Kyma X. more...

Kansas City, 31 Oct 2003 — Brian Belet's composition Lyra, for violin and Kyma system, will be performed by Patricia Strange on the Friday afternoon concert, October 31.

All computer sounds are generated in performance real time by Kyma. more...

Urbana, Illinois, 31 Oct 2003 — Agostino Di Scipio will be in Champaign to participate in the Herbert Brün festival and is using Kyma for live electronics and processing of two percussionists for Natura allo Specchio. more...

Urbana, Illinois, 31 Oct 2003 — Timeline diffused in 4 channels as part of the Brün festival (Herbert Brün Society); concert includes a performance of Agostino DiScipio (see adjacent entry in the calendar). more...

Udine, 25 Oct 2003 — more...

Dublin, 23 Oct 2003 — DEAF & MINIMISE present RAUSCH Featuring Frank Bretschneider [raster-noton/mille plateaux/12k, Berlin], Taylor Deupree [12k/ raster-noton/ ritornell, New York], Richard Chartier [ 12k/line / trente oiseaux ] Baltimore, Plus other guests to be confirmed. This will be Taylor's first live use of Kyma!

Minimise presented its first RAUSCH concert in March 2002 to a full house at Project and with guest Carsten Nicolai of the legendary raster-noton label giving a mesmerising audio-visual performance. While it is true that the concerts present modern minimal music, the presentation and impact of the shows are anything but subdued. The experience is cinematic and the presentation has a bold industrial feel, the performer often dwarfed by large scale graphic projections which react to the music, the venue blacked out and stripped back to it’s barest form. We are honoured to present the first Irish appearances of Taylor Deupree and Richard Chartier of the 12k/LINE labels and also to welcome back Frank Bretschneider [RAUSCH Nov ‘02], whose stunning projections and pulsing, energetic, science fiction dub sounds had people talking for some time afterwards. Other acts are also planned for the evening and the event promises to be something. more...

Paris, 20 Oct 2003 — Masterclass for composers and improvisers followed by a lecture presentation of Everett's compositions (including live Kyma interaction) for a general audience. more...

Paris, 18 Oct 2003 — Antony Hequet will give a lecture/demonstration of his use of Kyma in live vocal performance as part of the Resonances conference.

This is part of the TECHNOLOGIES GALLERY during the Resonances conference. In the IRCAM demonstration spaces, music industry and artists will present current live performance technologies that are in development or especially conceived for specific artistic needs. more...

New Releases

11 Sep 2011 — Long time Kyma user Max Urban has just released “Threnody to the Victims of 911” as a digital download. Max ran his guitar signal through the KYMA frequency tracker in order to trigger Pizzicato and Col Legno string samples throughout the six minute composition. The contrast of the raucous guitar tone with the random accompaniment of the string section gives the piece an eerie quality. Available now for download on iTunes. more...

16 Dec 2010 — "Bring your 'dream machine'," Andy Moor is reported to have nudged Yannis Kyriakides, lest he should decide to get lazy about bringing extra luggage along to their recent live improvisation gig in Florence, Rebetika, at Complesso Le Murate. Moor, an electric guitarist who notoriously eschews all manner of FX pedals, nonetheless loves the sound of Kyma, as you can hear on a new CD Folia produced by the duo. Kyriakides also used Kyma on two of the tracks of his new electro-acoustic chamber music CD, Antichamber. more...

07 Dec 2010 — Mike Johnson made extensive use of Kyma in his sound design work for Blizzard Entertainment's latest World of WarCraft expansion, Cataclysm as well as on another release earlier this year: Starcraft II. For Cataclysm, Johnson used Kyma to create hybrid vocalizations for several of the new creatures that now populate the world of Azeroth. Creatures with names such as Rock Demon, Fire Dragon, Slime Creature, Rock Worm, Stone Golem and Wood Creature were created by taking various human and animal vocalizations and warping them with fire, rock, and other elemental forces to visceral, terrifyingly effect. According to Johnson, "I couldn't have done it without my Kyma system." more...

30 Nov 2010 — Certain unforeseen events can almost literally befall us, unexpectedly and violently tearing into the web of our interconnections and relationships. In Yogesh Khubchandani's new film, The Acceptance, one such event has disrupted the existence of Elli (compellingly played by Alicia Lobo) to its very core. Khubchandani's poetic, spell-binding film uses images and sounds to create an urgent sense of mystery as he traces her inner journey from near despair to a calm acceptance. Khubchandani masterfully recreates a seamless interleaving of the inner imagination and outer events that constitute Elli's flow of experience. Intense emotion is experienced as sudden silence and a sense of time slowing almost to stop as the character focuses full attention on the anger or fear or frustration and the rest of the world disappears for that stretched-out moment of time. Several threads weave themselves throughout the film: the restorative power of nature, thanking God for what we do NOT have, vegetarianism as identity, the relationships between mothers and daughters (the male characters rarely appear on screen).

Khubchandani also did the sound design for the film, using the sounds of birds, wind and water contrasted with the rattling drones of machines to underscore his themes. Like the images, the sound slips easily back and forth between realism and the logic of dreams. Kyma played such a large role in this transformation, it even gets a credit at the end of the film! more...

23 Nov 2010 — Scott Miller is an Artist in Residence for Indaba Music, writing a blog each week on improvisation, collaboration and interactive electroacoustic music. Indaba Music is an online music community with half a million users that features a web-based DAW called Mantis where you can record, edit, mix, and collaborate with other members. Scott invites you to participate in the blog, especially if you would like to comment and help generate ideas and topics for him to address in future writings. more...

18 Nov 2010 — Charlie Norton has been re-organizing the tweaky*share page to make it easier to browse and download patches from the Kyma community! Check out the new arrangement at the link here. more...

14 Nov 2010 — Matteo Milani has created a set of Kyma studies, each coaxing an amazing range of timbres from a single synthesis algorithm; you can listen to them on SoundCloud. more...

13 Nov 2010 — On Varosha, a new multimedia work premiered on November 13, 2010, Yannis Kyriakides used Kyma for sound processing, morphing, stretching, and granulation. The material is derived from an interactive installation that used live video to track the XY position of people entering the installation and used that information to control the scrub-point of the granulation. The sensation was that of walking through frozen voices and fragments of 1970's Turkish and Greek pop music, creating a kind of topography of different voices mapped to the space. If you would walk in one direction at a particular speed you might hear the voice at its original speed and direction; if you would stop at any point then you would hear a frozen moment of the voice. Kyriakides describes it as "a simple concept but with powerful results." He then created a 'composed' version of the installation using a voice to replace the body. In this version, the voice is a 'tour guide' who leads the listener through the frozen sounds of the abandoned holiday resort of Varosha. more...

22 Oct 2010 — Symbolic Sound's Kyma Control for the iPad bundles four of the most popular Kyma controller-types into one, wireless multi-touch package that includes: a VCS, a pen/tablet controller, standard and Tonnetz keyboards, and accelerometers plus compass heading. more...

19 Oct 2010 — Delora Software is making it easy to connect Kyma to iPads and iPhone/iPods. They've recently announced two new products: CapyLink (which makes it possible for Capybara owners to connect to Delora's vKi and vKiP MotorMix emulations for the iPhone and iPad), and PacaConnect (which turns the built-in Airport on your Macintosh into an ad hoc local wireless network so you can use your iPad with your Pacarana without need for an additional wireless router). more...

16 Oct 2010 — AR Rahman used Kyma (Harm Visser's physical model 'American Flute') controlled by the Haken Audio Continuum Fingerboard on the dignified and ethereal Acid Darbari, part of his sound track for Danny Boyles' new film, 127 hours. Get a taste of the music here on YouTube. The full soundtrack is available for download from iTunes and Amazon. more...

10 Oct 2010 — In response to requests from fans of the show, Tobias Enhus' Kyma-laden score for Showtime's new series, Look is now available as an album on iTunes. Deliciously glitchy and featuring the Enhus signature synthesized vocals and glass cymbal trees, the 'Smoking Crack' track sounds more like LSD and brings to mind Enhus' ode to the Pacarana: Moore's Lullaby. more...

30 Aug 2010 — Delora Software has added three new products to their ever-expanding line of Kyma control surface and connectivity applications. vKi and vKi lite bring remote MotorMix emulation to your iPhone or iPod touch, and vKiP turns your iPad into a stunningly beautiful, full-featured wireless multi-touch MotorMix emulator. vKi, vKi lite and vKiP use Kyma's integrated Open Sound Control (OSC) features for direct WiFi communication with a Pacarana or Paca sound computation engine. No additional software is needed, making it usable with both OSX and Windows workstations!

For more details, please visit http://www.delora.com. vKi ($9.95), vKi lite (free) and vKiP ($39.95) are available on the App Store on iTunes. more...

29 Aug 2010 — Jean-Edouard Miclot has created a new blog on sound design, and the first two entries give a detailed, step-by-step look at how he created some amazing sounds in Kyma. The sounds (which you can audition right on the site)—crisp, warm, powerful, human, and sometimes humorous—seem to be inspired by and paying homage to the masters at Pixar and LucasFilm. It's fascinating, fun (and educational too!). more...

25 Aug 2010 — Miguel Gil and Enrico Bárbaro, dressed all in white and seated on a giant chess board, use both a Paca and a Capybara-320 controlled by Wacom tablet and MotorMix (and a few controllers and sound sources you have probably never seen before) in their fantastic new split-screen video giving new meaning to the phrase "Playing sounds"! more...

05 Aug 2010 — Scot Solida has been using TouchOSC and OSCulator on the iPad to control his Kyma/Capybara system, using a Kyma Sound he created to manipulate, chop, remix and reorder loops. He used four loops from a song he finished recently and used the TouchOSC panel to jam with it in real-time. The loops included a snippet of his voice from the chorus, a bit of guitar, a Univox drum box processed in TurboSynth, and an analog modular. Here are the results: http://www.theelectronicgarden.com/Scot/AnotherSubtleCrack.mp3 more...

21 Jul 2010 — Whaddup? for saxophone and electroacoustic music, was written by Mark Phillips specifically for very young saxophonists. It was composed at the request of Nicolas Prost, to whom the piece is dedicated. The entire accompaniment was created in Kyma using two sound sources: 1. an odd, limited assortment of samples (key clicks, key slaps, breath sounds, a clanking mouthpiece cover, a multiphonic and one fast run) recorded by Greg Sigman on a vintage 1927 Conn bass saxophone with a very noisy key action. 2. a recording of Cânes Nicolas speaking in French about traveling from his native Haiti to study music in the US and his anticipation of the 2010 World Cup. more...

08 Jul 2010 — DJ Kero, who cannot help but be inspired by the view of the Detroit skyline from his Windsor studio, has been invited to join the cast of Cunei Media. You can hear his Deep Space Events Kyma patch here. Listen to his Detroit Underground podcast on iTunes. more...

06 Jul 2010 — vKA joins vM2 and PacaMidi as the newest member of Harmony Systems' Delora Software products for enhancing and expanding your control over Kyma. vKA transforms the Akai APC40 hardware controller into a Kyma Virtual Control Surface with sixteen physical rotary controls and numerous lighted push button switches. vKA retains the APC40's tight integration with Ableton Live so that you can seamlessly alternate between "Ableton Live mode" and "Kyma VCS mode". more...

04 Jul 2010 — Ex Ovo, "Music For Minimal Matters," will be releasing Richard Lainhart's first collection of music for the label later this year. In the meantime, though, Ex Ovo has produced a special limited-edition release to coincide with his performance at Avantgarde Festival Schiphorst. The Schiphorst edition contains two tracks from the up-coming release, along with two other exclusive tracks, never heard before. Frans de Waard of Vital Weekly has this to say about it: "Lainhart is a master of drone music from the end of modern classical music. Playing a Steinway grand piano with nine e-bows, or the Kyma System on the electric guitar... Lainhart works extensively with the overtones generated by these 'simple' actions..." The new release contains two guitar/Kyma tracks: "A Bell Above The Clouds" and "Threshold." more...

24 Jun 2010 — Check under the Help menu in Kyma for a link to the latest Kyma update. A few highlights since the last eighth nerve include: —OSC (Open Sound Control) support on the Paca and Pacarana, —Support for the PreSonus FireStudio Project, TC Impact Twin & MOTU Ultra Lite Hybrid mk3 —Virtual Control Surfaces (VCS) now open 11 times faster (this includes switching between Layouts on an already-open VCS) — MultiSample and MultiFileDiskPlayer can AutoLabel the Index parameter with the names of the files Along with several new CapyTalk messages, Prototype Sounds, improvements to Tau frequency/time shifting and more! (Please see the full list of update improvements on the tweaky site). more...

15 Jun 2010 — Can a sound function as a symbol? What is your earliest sonic memory? Can sound convey meaning? These and other questions are being debating now on Peter Rantasa's new Philosophy of Sound Forum. more...

12 Jun 2010 — Agostino Di Scipio discusses his compositions with Federico Placidi and Matteo Milani (aka Unidentified Sound Object) in this video and written interview. more...

11 Jun 2010 — You can hear an example of Christian Schloesser's 'Kyma Virtual Analog Drum Synthesizer" here. Bounce, Spin, Reverse are part of the instrument(s) themselves (for example, each of the 8 outputs has three MemoryWriters with global retriggers for bouncing). All Sounds and "manipulators" are mapped to MIDI keys so they can be played in real time. No samples were used in this example. It is all synthesized, waveshaped and compressed using Kyma/Pacarana, then recorded via ADAT into Digital Performer 7 with no overdub, no EQ, no compressor and no FX, exported and converted to mp3 using the L.A.M.E. encoder. more...

01 Jun 2010 — music videoclip, using paca and capybara. more...

20 Apr 2010 — Rob Rayle's second Outersect CD, God Love the Fool, was released April 20, 2010 on Beats and Pieces records, Israel. The CD makes extensive use Kyma and of the Outersect modeler, a set of microsounds for the Capybara that were coded by Rob Rayle to emulate the expressive characteristics and modes of acoustic instruments using a small number of simple parameters that relate directly to the actions of real-world players. more...

07 Mar 2010 — Software developer by day and music enthusiast by night, Bar None uses Kyma with MANTA, Eigenharp, analog synths, Monomes and anything else that generates or controls sound! (Did we mention he loves OSC?) more...

02 Feb 2010 — Did you know that you can check for free Kyma software updates any time you like by selecting Check for updates... from the Help menu in Kyma? Make sure you are benefiting from all the latest features and improvements. Read more...

28 Jan 2010 — To copy the full path name of a file in order to paste it somewhere else: In the Sound Browser, locate and select the file. In the small info window at the bottom of the Sound Browser, use Ctrl+L to make the window large. Select and copy the full path name (or any other information about the file). Now you're ready to paste! more...

25 Jan 2010 — Sascha Dikiciyan has just released the soundtrack for the Raven Faction in the Sony game called MAG (the Massive Action Game on the PS3); he used Kyma to treat the theme remix. Read the interview at gameinformer and download the music from iTunes. more...

24 Jan 2010 — Helen Bellringer used Kyma to create the sounds for the Blockee iPod/iPhone game as part of her internship at Radium and is about to begin her fourth year of studies in Creative Music Technology at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama: more...

08 Jan 2010 — Richard Devine utilized Kyma processing on his track for Music for Our Future, a compilation of music inspired by the world of SyFy's Caprica, curated by XLR8R, Pitchfork and Create Digital Music. Processing sound sources ranging from water and leaves to giant turkeys and pigs' breathing, Devine layered spectral analysis, morphing, granular processing, and FM synthesis to create a "roller-coaster ride of audio frequency dynamics." For more details and photos, see Create Digital Music site. Devine also mentions his Kyma set up in his video with Electronic Musician (EM). more...

05 Jan 2010 — Prism Audio's well-regarded Orpheus audio converter is now working with the Paca(rana). For a full list of supported audio converters, please visit: http://www.symbolicsound.com/Learn/SupportedConverters more...

14 Dec 2009 — Paul Doornbusch has created a fascinating chronology of computer music placing musical and technological developments in computer music along side contemporaneous technological breakthroughs in other fields. more...

31 Sep 2009 — In Migration, HamiltonSterling and Jimmy Haslip take us on a journey that begins in Senegal and ends up on another planet. Using Kyma timbre-scapes and live performances on bass and percussion, Haslip and Sterling create an immersive soundtrack tracing humankind's restless and inevitable journey out of Africa and outward to the stars. Inevitable in part due to what Huntington Ellsworth calls human kind's "innate migratory tendency" and partly due to "Nature's stern urgency" (COP15?). The best listening is in surround-sound with the lights dimmed: Side 1 (white band) of the DVD is a 5.1 Dolby Digital version and a 2 channel PCM 24-bit 48 kHz version. Side 2 (red band) is a 5.1 24 bit 48 kHz DVD-Audio 5.1 version; this is definitely a 'hi fi', 'audiophile' type experience. It's a soundtrack that creates its own visuals inside your head. Listen to a preview and order your own copy from Helikon Sound , CDBaby, or Amazon. more...

29 Aug 2009 — In August, 2009, Symbolic Sound expanded the real-time sound-computing power of the Paca(rana) sound engine by making it possible for Kyma sound designers to chain two or more multiprocessor Paca(rana)s together via the built-in A/B Expansion ports. To the Kyma software, a network of Paca(rana)s appears as a single sound computation engine with multiple processors. Kyma automatically detects the number of available processors and schedules the execution of DSP-intensive signal processing and synthesis algorithms across multiple processors. more...

21 Aug - Sept 7 2009 — Composer Edmund Eagan was commissioned to do the sound track for "E", a large scale video projection conceived and directed by Alain Couture for the 2009 Canadian National Exhibition. Each night of the CNE (August 21st to September 7th, 2009), the exterior of the southeast entrance to the Direct Energy Centre was transformed into a giant canvas onto which fantastic building-sized images were projected. The animation was created using 3D software rendered against a 3D model of the actual building. The result was amazing optical illusions, creating the impression that the interior of the building was on fire, or that the building had transformed itself into a huge aquarium, a Mayan temple, or a Gothic cathedral, or that faces were extruding out from the stone and smiling down at the people below. The sound track, rich Kyma-based sound generation controlled by the Haken Continuum, Space Navigator, and Wiimote, was delivered through a quadraphonic sound reinforcement system.

E Promo 1 gives a sped up synopsis of some of the images from the original 30 minute presentation. The soundtrack for this excerpt is a section of the E score featuring a Continuum Fingerboard performance of a Mellotron flute sound designed and realized in Kyma. You might almost believe entire thing is a video animation until you notice people opening the doors and leaving the building. In this hilarious excerpt, Eagan turns the Direct Energy Center into a giant game of Pong, complete with an ersatz Kraftwerk parody sound track (featuring Edmund's voice processed through Kyma). All buildings should look and sound like this whenever the sun goes down! more...

01 Aug 2009 — Espresso lovers might enjoy savoring the dark brown bittersweet liqueur even more when it's sipped from demitasse cups decorated with dancing Pacaranas. Click here and scroll down below the T-shirts. more...

30 Jul 2009 — Tobias Enhus is teaming up with Crystal Method for the score of ESPN and Disney's new 3-D film on the X Games. An opening sequence featuring Enhus' Kyma treatments of Hasidic reggae star Matisyahu's voice over slow motion 3D shots of extreme sports is worth the price of admission all on its own! The premiere is scheduled for July 30 2009 at the 6000-seat Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles. more...

28 Jul 2009 — Doug Kraul's vM2 (as in "virtual MotorMix") is a Mac OSX application that provides a way of using a suitable alternative hardware controller with applications that require a MotorMix. vM2 includes a JazzMutant Lemur project template so that a Lemur multitouch hardware controller can be used as a substitute for the MotorMix in Kyma. more...

20 Jul 2009 — The latest version of (Kyma X.67) includes a resizable clock, improvements to Tau, plus numerous miscellaneous improvements. There is now support for the Mackie Onyx 1220 Mixer with optional FireWire I/O card to be used as an audio interface for the Paca(rana), and there is a new tutorial video on the Timeline. more...

10 Jul 2009 — Rob Rayle has released his Outersect Modeler for Kyma on the Capybara: a set of microcoded Sounds that allow the user to emulate the expressive characteristics and modes of acoustic instruments by manipulating a small number of simple parameters that relate directly to the actions of real-world players. Many of these sounds are "realistic" and others behave the way natural instruments behave and are expressive in many of the same ways that acoustic instruments are expressive. For demos and purchasing information, please see the Outersect website. more...

15 Jun 2009 — Check out Photonal's music-generated videos on his website. Photonal (aka composer Andrew Purdy) uses Kyma, Logic, and Quartz Composer to map various musical elements such as a kick drum, vocal or pad sweep, to graphic parameters such as dimension, color or rotation in XYZ space to dynamically create image sequences. more...

09 Jun 2009 — Composer Sascha Dikiciyan is interviewed in Fangoria about his score for [PROTOTYPE], the new Activision game based in a post-viral-infected New York City. Balancing the orchestral and cinematic with dark ambient electronics, Sascha and composing-partner Cris Velasco create a darkly brooding and frightening world. In the interview, Sascha describes how he used Kyma to create an intense feeling of tension using low frequency, almost naseau-inducing humming sound clouds for New Order and other themes throughout the game. more...

01 July 2009 — Ambrose Field's Being Dufay, released worldwide this month on ECM/Universal and mixed in analog at Oslo's Rainbow Studio, features Kyma throughout. Field took fragments of music by the 15th century composer, sung by tenor John Potter, and placed them in new digitally modified settings. Kyma was used to create a flexible, digital model of Potter's voice. Using Tau synthesis, Field was able to morph Potter into female backing singers and a haze of new medieval choirs. Being Dufay received 5 star ratings for both music and production in the June edition of BBC Music Magazine, with allaboutjazz.com dubbing it "one of the most hauntingly beautiful records of the year" and concluding: "...this is music created by the heart as much as the mind." Read the full review at BBC Music Magazine.

A schedule of live peformances of Being Dufay can be found here. more...

26 May 2009 — Mike Johnson completed the audio post production for the cinematics for the new PS3 exclusive game InFAMOUS for Sucker Punch. Kyma emerged as the main processor for creating all of the electrical sound effects for the main character, Cole McGrath. Johnson explains that there aren't a lot of CD libraries with great sounding electrical effects to draw from, so one has to create and/or record their own custom sounds. For InFAMOUS he recorded Styrofoam rubs, squeaks, and scrapes that he then pitched, reordered, and granulated with Kyma to create a whole new palette of custom electrical sound effects. more...

24 Apr 2009 — JOMO (aka Luddy Harrison and Pan Luoyi) have released their first album under the Dong Music International label, celebrating the release with a live show at Star Live in Beijing on April 24, 2009. Instrumental sounds on the album were created using a Virus TI for the bulk of the ordinary electronic sounds, Kyma for special or difficult sounds, and a V-Synth for fills. Pan Luoyi's airy-yet-precise vocals are in English (she plans to release the same songs in Mandarin at a later date) blending with Luddy's lush, densely layered, calmly-paced instrumental parts, peppered with intriguing sound-effects.   Break Your Heart could be the theme song for a film noir remake of a Bond film. You can hear excerpts from the new album at the Dong Music's website.

JOMO is available on Amazon China with an international release planned soon (watch the Jomo website for updates). While you're there, be sure to check out Luddy's blog on his experiences as a new immigrant to China. more...

27 Mar 2009 — Agostino Di Scipio's STANZE PRIVATE ecosystemic sound construction is part of an exhibition entitled Anlage Towards a Musical Protorealism which opened on 27 March 2009 at the Galerie Mario Mazzoli in Berlin. These works of sound art were chosen as exemplars of a new protorealism movement; the works "do not represent life, they create life, and then give it to us very directly, each dragging us into a sonic environment that forces us to reinterpret our own perception of reality." more...

21 Feb 2009 — Sound designer Ben Burtt has won the Career Achievement Award from the Motion Picture Sound Editor's during the Golden Reel Awards ceremony February 21, 2009:

Other Kyma sound designers recognized with Golden Reel awards for their work this year include Matthew Wood for Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Wall*E, Hamilton Sterling for sound effects on The Dark Knight, and Ben Burtt for Wall*E. more...

31 Jan 2009 — "I'm about to be eaten," begins Josh Harris, the main character in the Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning documentary We Live in Public. That line, symbolizing our ingestion of media including the documentary itself, was granularly processed through Kyma by composer/producer Marco d'Ambrosio. According to d'Ambrosio, the 60 minute score he composed in collaboration with Ben Decter is "laden with Kyma." "It's a pretty trippy show," d'Ambrosio continues, "and Kyma was exactly the right tool for the job." more...

12 Jan 2009 — Have you ever wished for a smaller, more powerful sound computation engine for Kyma? The Paca and Pacarana are 2-5 times faster than the Capybara*320 and about 1/6th the size. For more details visit: http://www.symbolicsound.com/Products/Pacarana more...

09 Jan 2009 — Composed while lucidly dreaming and realized using a Tenori-on controlling Kyma, AC's latest album, One, was influenced both by his studies with Karlheinz Stockhausen and his experiences DJ-ing. Described as "pure ambient bliss," the album bathes the listener in gentle binaural landscapes. AC describes Kyma as "the perfect tool for the imagination."  One is available from 666 ZipCode Town Rekkids. more...

30 Jul 2008 — SlipStick generates a wide variety of audio and control signals — ranging from creaking-door sound effects to expressive keyboard-controlled additive oscillator instruments that explode into shards of temple bells as they decay. SlipStick can also create a rich filter-excitation signal or a planet-smashing live audio distortion effect. Kyma X.54 and the new SlipStick modules are free to registered Kyma X owners. more...

25 Jul 2008 — Exactly Where You Are, Lucibel Crater's disturbing new music video on pervasive self-surveillance, features Kyma processing throughout, most overtly and extensively in the bridge. The snippety-glitched-filtered vocals and the heartbeat bass drum are the result of Kyma manipulation, and several of the other loops were processed through Kyma as well. more...

24-27 Jul 2008 — Hamilton Sterling used Kyma to create dinosaur vocalizations on a teaser for Land of the Lost, starring Will Ferrell, to be released in the summer of 2009. The teaser was unveiled at the July 2008 ComicCon in San Diego where Hamilton's T-rex scream was a big hit with the crowd. more...

18 Jul 2008 — It seems that, just like a real bat, The Batman of The Dark Knight uses sound to visualize the world, and Hamilton Sterling is the man behind that sound. Sterling, who is listed in the credits as Additional Sound Designer but who also cut hours of sound FX for the film, was in the throes of editing when lead Sound Designer Richard King came into the studio and asked him for a temp sound to go with The Batman's sonar vision device before they sent it off to the picture department. Given fewer than two hours to come up with a unique sound for a crucial plot element, Sterling turned to a library of Kyma Sounds he had designed for his AI Opera (an ongoing composition project that he works on between film gigs). He found an appropriately swirly sonar-ific sound, cut it to the right length, added some additional processing in ProTools, and then he and King sent it off to the picture department. Everyone loved the sound and thus it survived to become the sound of The Batman's sonar vision in the final version of the film. Sterling's advice to fellow Kyma users? "Build your Kyma Sound library the same way you collect samples for your recorded sound effects library. You never know when you may be called upon to create a completely unique sound under a short deadline. If you've been slowly building your library, you can mine it for sources of inspiration under time pressure." By the way, if you see The Dark Knight in an iMax theatre "Prepare to be pummelled by the sound FX", Sterling adds gleefully. more...

10 Jul 2008 — The calming, peaceful soundtrack for Richard Lainhart's abstract HD film, Drift is based on an improvisation for lapsteel guitar performed by Lainhart and processed through Kyma. For additional news on Richard's upcoming performances, see his website. more...

01 Jul 2008 — Kyma is detectable on several tracks off the new album, Lucibel Crater: The Family Album (Searching Eye Records), reviewed in the July 2008 issue of Buzzbin magazine and available on iTunes or at Lucibel's website. Threadbare Funeral (with guest artist Lou Reed on guitar), features Kyma-synthesized tabla-esque drums and metal-bars, and a monkish vocal that was synthesized from a glottal-pulse. You can also hear the effects of Kyma's stereo plate reverb and the input-output compressor. more...

20 Jun 2008 — A video performance of Carla Scaletti's SlipStick (for Continuum fingerboard and Kyma) is viewable at her website. All sounds for this piece are generated by an algorithm modelling a mass at the end of a spring dragged across a surface with friction, resulting in a range of sounds from creaks to squeaks to pure sine wave oscillations.

A binaural mix-down of Cyclonic, a new 6-channel Kyma-generated composition commissioned in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Experimental Music Studios at the University of Illinois, can be heard at the website. more...

09 Jun 2008 — Re-experience the idea of the 'Schubert song cycle' and 'pop music' through the subtle and sophisticated filter of composer/organist Wolfgang Mitterer's musical imagination in two new releases from col legno. In Im Sturm, a baritone song cycle is delicately punctuated with electronic chittering and pianistic jabs that evolve into entropically decaying clock chimes. Although billed the exceptionally gifted organist, composer and specialist in electronics Wolfgang Mitterer's...first foray into pop: Sopop is not pop music, but rather Mitterer's experience of and reflections on pop music: English lyrics, action-verb titles, beats, and a universe where anything and everything is sampled and re-imagined. more...

02 Jun 2008 — Culture-theorist and Kyma artist Steven Brown has posted a video of some of his experiments controlling Kyma and various analog synthesizers using the Tenori-on. Brown, who conceives of music visually, says that he feels at home with Tenori-on's synaesthetic approach to music-making. The Tenori-on has MIDI I/O and can either generate its own MIDI clock or sync with an external one. The controllers are still rare enough that Brown has not had an opportunity to try pairing his Tenori-on with another one, but once he does, be prepared for some emergent sound and light structures emanating from Eugene! more...

13 May 2008 — Producer Rich Costey described Kyma as "unbelievably deep" in an interview he did last year with EQ Magazine. Discussing a track called Supermassive Black Hole from the recent Muse album Black Holes and Revelations, Costey wrote: "...I processed a whole bunch of samples through a Kyma system which I have, which is basically just an open architecture sound designer box and you can build whatever you want. It's unbelievably deep - it's like a black hole of sound design. It's similar in context to Reactor, but I think it's much deeper and it sounds incredible. A lot of the drums on that track were processed by a Kyma. The sounds that are jumping out, and the fills and stuff, that's all processed by the Kyma." more...

26 Apr 2008 — Listen for Edmund Eagan's Kyma/Continuum/Serge drenched score on Nik Sheehan's new documentary, Flicker: the True Story of Brion Gysin and the Dream Machine, premiering at the Hot Docs Festival in Toronto. Eagan's score is perfectly evocative of the era and of the questions being explored by Gysin in his collaborations with William S Burroughs. The score features extensive use of Kyma, analog synthesizers and the Continuum to help bring to life Gysin's art, friendships, ideas and his fascination with self-identity. A sonic four channel interpretation of the Dream Machine was created using a Serge modular synthesizer, which could then be selectively tuned to harmonize within the various movements of the musical score. The voice of Marianne Faithfull (one of the principal characters in the documentary) was sampled and analysed within Kyma to create time variant deliveries of the phrase "beautiful, simple, magical object." Granular ambiences, modal tone shaping, formant shifted voices and numerous other Kyma sounds were played on the Continuum with the assistance of Wacom Tablet and Wiimote control input. Listen to the trailer and a sampling of the music here. more...

20 Apr 2008 — USO (Unidentified Sound Object) is featured in Transition—Turbulence, a project of New Radio and Performing Arts. Turbulence is dedicated to commissioning, exhibiting, and archiving new and emerging hybrid networked art forms. Check out the USO feature here or the above link. more...

17 Apr 2008 — Cristian Vogel's Double Deux / Delicado is now available on Last.FM. Known for his work on experimental techno labels such as Tresor, Novamute and Mille Plateaux, Vogel's music has more recently been electrifying a different kind of dance floor. When Franz Treichler (Young Gods) introduced Cristian to Swiss choreographer Gilles Jobin it was, as they describe it, "love at first sight". Since then Cristian has scored the music for four of Jobin's creations including Double Deux (2006) and Delicado (2004). more...

14 Apr 2008 — Taylor Deupree used Kyma to do the processing on NYC/Tokyo artist Sawako's CD Hum. In Hum, Sawako starts with sounds of everyday life, processes them, and works them into melodies and arrangements employing piano, voice, roomtones, field recordings, and DSP processing by Deupree. more...

31 Mar 2008 — Sound (and experience) designer Lorenzo Brusci has set up a new network of professionals dedicated to the idea of conceiving and re-designing human habitats through environmental interaction design, sound composition and site specific acoustics research. Their goal is to enhance urban life and public/private architecture, with an eye (and ear) toward improving the human experience. For example, they are doing work on masking and transfiguring the noise inherent in city environments. For more information on their goals and activities, visit http://www.soundexperiencedesign.com more...

10 Jan 2008 — Camille Troillard has released a new version of OSCulator at http://www.osculator.net. Already widely used for controlling Kyma with the Nintendo Wiimote and Jazz Mutant's Lemur touch surfaces, Camille's new version of OSCulator now includes support for the 3D Connexion Space Navigator. more...

23 Dec 2007 — In an interview with GameZone, sound designer/composer Kemal Amarasingham describes how he used a lawnmower and Kyma's REResonator to create animalistic animalistic language for Mage Knight Apocalypse. As Kemal puts it, ""We believe that when audio, visuals and gameplay are all tied into one another that all three become much stronger." For the full interview, see GameZone. more...

22 Dec 2007 — Thinking of interfacing Kyma with other software and hardware? Check out some of the offerings by your fellow Kyma-ites on the tweaky, including:

* AC Toolbox: Paul Berg's algorithmic composition toolbox, written in LISP, can generate and send control values directly to the Capybara via the Flame Firewire interface.

* Flame Max Objects by David Kiers: Send int/float controller values from Max to the Capybara through the Flame Firewire interface.

* Capy Max External by Greg Wuller: Like David's flame object, the capy object can send controller values from Max to the Capybara via the Firewire interface but it adds support for Global Maps as well as being a Universal Binary.

* AlphaTrack to OSC by Garth Paine: A Max app that uses JavaScript to parse the MIDI messages from the Frontier Designs Alphatrack, and output them as OSC messages. This allows users to seamlessly pass the control messages through OSCulator to Kyma (note that there is a new release of OSCulator at http://www.osculator.net). The app is downloadable from: http://www.activatedspace.com/software/Software.html more...

21 Dec 2007 — Sound designer Dustin Camilleri has posted the first in what he plans to be a series of sample packs under the Creative Commons license. sndshare0107 focuses on ambient soundscapes and noises, all generated by patches he designed in Kyma. According to Dustin, you're free to use these samples in whatever way you'd wish as long as you drop him a line and let him know how you're using them. Dustin's goal is to create a free-flowing sound exchange where anyone can upload/download anything. Create, reshape, share, collaborate! (woot!) more...

20 Dec 2007 — Melissa Stark's Voices is a CD of evocative soundscapes realized in Kyma and mixed in Pro Tools. You can listen to excerpts from this work in progress on bMuze where you can also vote for your favorites. In the track titled Fall of Mercury we hear the whispers of a race of Mercurians even after their planet falls into the gravitational field of the sun. more...

18 Dec 2007 — Is it a wave? Is it a particle? No, it's both (and Egypt too)! Experience Greg Hunter's "smooth mix of crunchy glitch covered in a rich ethnodelic sauce" on his new "Lake of Dreams" podcast. "Love is the only miracle there is." more...

07 Dec 2007 — Ghost Strings, audio CD by Patricia Strange, violin (2006). A collection of five compositions for violin and computer processing including Ghost String by Jeffrey Stolet (2005) and Lyra by Brian Belet (2002). IMG Media CD-02-01, 2006. more...

28 Nov 2007 — Check out Cristian Vogel's crisply entrancing Never Engine videos on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s19NYeEDB0A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb9IEKDVI3U

And Cristian's music for choreographer Gilles Jobin's dance company here: http://www.no-future.com/erutufon/showthread.php?t=25019 more...

27 Oct 2007 — If some of the tracks on AARDE A Whole Day (DirtyCDR 025) seem to evolve like slow surges of the deep sea or suggest the mesmerizing thrum of engines, the rush of water or screeches of gulls, the explanation could lie in this one unusual fact. Lois Laplace is both composer and a professional sailor. Aarde is a collaboration of Laplace on Kyma, and Guillaume Gargaud on computer and prepared guitar. Laplace, who describes the sound of Kyma as "very pure," has a talent for revealing subtle and delicate details in the midst of an industrial environment like a commercial ship. Whether focusing intently on the minutest variations of light reflecting off the surface of the water or constructing soundscapes of soothing engine drones with in-your-ear glitches and mysteriously delicate noise bands that evolve at just the right pace, Aarde's music is simultaneously vast and delicate: truly minimalist without ever becoming boring. You can listen to some of the tracks on Virb and order the CD from Dirty Demos. more...

19 Oct 2007 — Tobias Enhus used Kyma to render middle eastern flutes and Arabic vocals on the score for Rendition opening in theaters on October 19. Tobias performed the re-pitched flutes and voice live using his Max Mathews radio baton. Watch for Tobias' name in the credits under Synth Programming. more...

11 Oct 2007 — Providing enhanced support for multichannel sound synthesis, processing, mixing and recording, Kyma X.47 is now available as a free update to registered Kyma X users. Also included with the release are over 150 new multichannel Sounds for the Kyma Sound Library. more...

08 Oct 2007 — Cristian Vogel's The NeverEngine is a collection of recordings synthesized using his own custom sequencing algorithms in Kyma for interpolating between data-states, sliding beats into bleeps and tones into drones. Vogel has been overseeing the refinement and evolution of these interpolating state engines, and in tresor.321, he presents the first chapter documenting the sonic results of this concentrated research and development. more...

21 Sep 2007 — Hamilton Sterling used Kyma's CrossFilter to create weird, low-end wind-based drones that rise and fall with the winds for The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, a film whose title is almost as long as the film itself (2 hours, 40 minutes). The musical score for the film is only 30 minutes long, so Sterling's drone ambiences (and their absence) play an important role in creating tension in the film (described by Sterling as "the most artistic film I've been privileged to work on.") Brad Pitt (who also produced the film) won the 2007 Venice Film Festival Best Actor award for his portrayal of James. Watch for Hamilton's name in the credits as Additional Sound Supervision and Sound Effects Editor. For more information and trailers, see the website. more...

10 Sep 2007 — Musician/Remixer/Producer, DC, used Kyma for synthesis and processing of the NIN (Nine Inch Nails) song Only from their release With Teeth. The Remix title is: Melon Cucumber Headphone Remix by DC 4 defrostMusic. defrostMusic is DC's music production company with credits including the Grammy-Award-Winning "Just Chillin'" by Norman Brown, Al Jarreau, George Benson, Bob James and others... more...

21 Aug 2007 — Kemal Amarasingham, creative director at dSonic, used Kyma to generate ambient sounds and process voices for Irrational Games (now 2k Boston), new title: BioShock. dSonic was responsible for all the voice processing on the audio logs, radios, PA announcements, TVs etc., as well creating the sound effects for the plasmid weapons and ambient sounds for 5 of the levels in the game. more...

19 Aug 2007 — USO Project (Federico Placidi and Matteo Milani) have released Prelude of Noises, a Kyma-generated homage to Musique concrète as a free video on their blog. more...

13 Aug 2007 — On August 13, 2007, Outersect (Rob Rayle) released his worldwide debut solo album, Caldera, nine tracks combining acoustic vocals, instruments, and electronics in a variety of psychedelic downtempo styles ranging from dub to ethnotechno. Caldera is a spiritually motivated album intended to reach out to people using spiritual psychedelic music in order to help them move towards a higher understanding. You can hear lots of Kyma on the CD (including some new synthesis algorithms that Rob programmed for himself using DSP assembly language). In particular, listen to Track 7 (almost everything is Kyma or Kyma-processed) and Track 9 (the pedal-steel lead sound is Kyma), plus there are various Kyma sounds interspersed throughout the album. Check http://www.outersect.net for more information on the album and upcoming live dates. The name of the album comes from a free event Rayle hosted inside the caldera of an extremely large volcano in the Eastern Sierra. more...

22 Jul 2007 — Lots of Kyma applied in the mixing and performance of the debut album from Cristian Vogel's latest band endeavour, Night of the Brain. more...

01 Jul 2007 — How do you synthesize the sound of hundreds of tiny insect feet rapidly descending a blade of grass? Hamilton Sterling used Kyma to accomplish the feat for 11th Hour, Leonardo Di Caprio's feature-length documentary on the global environment described by Variety's Justin Chang as "a ruminative essay on what it means to be human in a scarce world." According to Sterling, "I quite liked using various granularized samples in a sequencer with a quick tempo to mimic the tiny feet of insect colonies rapidly moving up and down a blade of grass. more...

20 Jun 2007 — In his Chennai studio, composer A. R. Rahman used Kyma to design ghostly effects for his hauntingly obsessive score for Bombil and Beatrice, a tale of star-crossed lovers whose love survives 100 years, death, and reincarnation. Bombil and Beatrice was recently premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. more...

11 Jun 2007 — Kyma X users are invited to download the latest update, Kyma X.45.1 (6.451). Some of the new or improved features include: optional tick marks and labels on VCS faders, improved accuracy of bpm: for hot values of !BPM, new Sound modules (Replicator and MultiSpectrum), several new CapyTalk expressions (for example, 'aSamplesFileName' bpmForBeats: beatsPerBar), a quick expression for making multiple numbered copies of a fader using !Fader copies:, and several other improvements and optimizations. This update is free to registered Kyma X users. more...

10 Jun 2007 — Christiaan Gelauff has announced the release of CAG5, an extensive set of synthesis and filtering modules for Kyma, available for download from his site for 35 Euro. more...

09 Jun 2007 — Supervising Sound Editor Paul McFadden made extensive use of Kyma's RE Synthesis on the BBC's new Doctor Who series. Listen for the RE effect in the sounds of Werewolves and the Beast. McFadden also used Kyma to morph The Wire's scream into a 1 kHz television tone. more...

08 Jun 2007 — A new version of OSCulator (a Macintosh application for interfacing OSC devices and Nintendo Wiimote to Kyma) was released on 8 June 2007. The new version allows for four Wiimotes at once in the same document (and as many simultaneous documents as you want). Also, a couple of annoying bugs have been corrected. more...

07 Jun 2007 — David Mooney and Maxine Heller's collaborative piece, Why Do You Want to Come to Santa Barbara Graduate School?, has been selected for inclusion on elektramusic's CD, Electroacoustic Music Volume 02, scheduled for release on June 7, 2007. more...

30 May 2007 — In May, Treyarch released its Spiderman-III game, featuring an original musical score with Kyma processing by Tobias Enhus and Kyma-assisted sound design by Brian Fredrickson. more...

19 May 2007 — Photos and videos of Wacom and Wiimote-controlled Kyma performances have recently been sighted on the web:

http://www.syncsonics.com/blog/?page_id=99 (Garth Paine & Wacom tablet)

http://www.machinehead.com/dc/visuals/dc_wiiandkyma.mp4 (Dustin Camilleri, a dog, and a Wimmote)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlTnLxqxUZs (USOProject's Jedi Fantasy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESDzYYl0__s (Wiimote->OSCulator->Kyma)

http://picasaweb.google.com/ecodigitography/CamdenHavenMusicFestival (Garth Paine @ Camden Haven Music Festival) more...

18 May 2007 — Enrico Barbaro did the sound design and mixing for Y que cumplas muchos más, a short film by director David Alcalde that asks the question "What if a serial baby killer meets a baby serial killer?" (He warns potential viewers that the film is disturbing and gory). Barbaro used Kyma to generate and process the ambiences for the film. He also used Kyma to process the sound on a 30 second spot for Peugeot XBox (don't touch that button!). Both these clips (as well as excerpts from his musical projects utilizing Kyma) are available at Enrico's website. more...

17 May 2007 — Paul Berg has written a Universal Binary version of the AC Toolbox (with Capybara support) and it is now available through the tweaky Share area or directly from his website. more...

16 May 2007 — Mike Johnson, Audio Post Production Manager at Sony SCEA, utilized his Kyma system on the God of War II video game project for Playstation 2. According to Johnson, Kyma "gave me a creative edge in creating god-like vocals, electrical effects, and other-worldly surround ambiences. The granular functionality of the system allowed me the freedom to experiment with and abuse audio while always generating useful results." more...

15 May 2007 — Sound designer for the Apple iPod television commercials, François Blaignan, has just revamped the website for Tinitus Sound Design and Music. Blaignan and his partners have started construction on a new studio in proximity to the USC Film School where they will be doing music and sound for advertising and independent films. more...

14 May 2007 — Composer Kees Tazelaar has launched a comprehensive new website on his work, including the reconstruction of classic electronic compositions, his own original compositions, photography, upcoming performances, broadcasts and lectures. Included are complete mp3 recordings of three compositions realized entirely in Kyma: Lasciar Vibrare v.5 (2004, 34 minutes), Chroma 1 (2006, 12 minutes) and his newest work, the shimmering, lively and evocative Zeitraum - Ort - Zeichen - Sterne (2007, 20 minutes). more...

02 Apr 2007 — Camille Troillard (currently on tour with his band Neïmo) has announced a new version of his Open Sound Control translator, OSCulator 2.0. Among other things, version 2 enables Mac users to control the parameters of Kyma Sounds using the Wii Remote, an inexpensive wireless 3-D accelerometer made by Nintendo for the Wii gaming console. Check out the demo video. more...

08 Apr 2007 — Karl Richard and The Orange Hut Studio announce the launch of their new website. To quote the Orange Hut team, "We proud parents are happy to say that the Beta crawl has (at last) turned into the fully-fledged hip-swinging stride of a sexually charged hedonistic adolescent. So play with its knobs, press its buttons, and leave the seeds of your ideas here to grow in its fertile folds... And kindly do let us know of any errors, insights, views you may have had while treading it's shimmering silicon shores." more...

07 Apr 2007 — Unidentified Sound Object (MatteoMilani and FedericoPlacidi) have started aggregating media and texts related to sound design, news, and history of electronic and computer music on their new blog. There is at least one new video per day guaranteed to be of interest to sound designers and electronic musicians so it is well worth bookmarking it or subscribing to their RSS feed. more...

06 Apr 2007 — Michael Strohmann and Dietmar Bruckmayr used Kyma for live vocal processing in their work Imago. The original idea was that the voice of a singer/performer should be the sole generator for everything that happens to that voice. Digital machines dismantle, transform and duplicate his voice and ultimately merge it in its frequency domain with other sounds. This recursive relationship between voice and machine leads to a successive dissolution of the difference between analog and digital sound sources for the listener and the singer. Although the singer remains outwardly the creator and authority in charge of the acoustic events, the purported expansion and enrichment of the vocalized expression ultimately turns into manipulation and estrangement. more...

05 Apr 2007 — Christiaan Gelauff is cooking up a new version of his CAG microsounds and he has included several mp3 demos in the table of new modules. more...

04 Apr 2007 — Harm Visser has developed a new series of wind instruments for his Kyma Acoustic Modelling Toolkit. Among other things, they provide a much better breath control and the breath noise can start before the actual instrument sound starts. He has also made improvements to overblowing and multiphonics using Christiaan Gelauff's saturator. Anyone who purchased the original acoustic modelling toolkit should have received this update by email (if not, please notify Harm Visser). more...

03 Apr 2007 — The German professional magazine Sound & Recording is holding a film music recording and sound design contest for which they have invited Dipl.-Ing. Judith Nordbrock both to serve on the jury and to select the film. She has chosen Manuel Schmitt's 2005 3D animated movie Living Legacy for which Judith created the sound design in Kyma. Contestants will receive a copy of the movie and one audio track. more...

22 Feb 2007 — Composer Tobias Enhus has just finished scoring the soundtrack for Paragraf 78, a Russian sci-fi thriller involving viruses and commandos (directed by Mikhail Khleborodov). To create an intimate, even claustrophobic feel, Enhus went with reduced orchestrations and just the slightest touch of reverb in contrast to his usual lush atmospheric style. Enhus even orchestrated some of the cues specifically to work well with his custom Kyma processing patches for doing time-stretching, pitch shifting and convolution. Orchestral segments are augmented by recordings of Tobias (Kyma + analog synthesizer) improvising with Richard Fortus (6-string electric cello). The result is described by Enhus as Solaris meets Aliens...but more evil! more...

17 Jan 2007 — Camille Troillard has just released version 1.4 of OSCulator—the application that lets OSC-enabled hardware and software talk to Kyma. Included in the new version are: OSC-generated keystrokes (works with Edmund Eagan's QWERTY keyboard layout on the Lemur) and high-precision transmission of MIDI inputs to Kyma from other applications. For full details, please visit his website. more...

13 Jan 2007 — Listen to the rich and deeply resonant sounds of Richard Lainhart's live radio performance on WDFH in New York. One of the versions of "Cranes Fly West" is for electric lap steel guitar processed by Kyma; on "One Word" he plays Kyma using MIDI faders; and "The Tiger's Dream" is for Continuum and Kyma. more...

11 Jan 2007 — Check out the video of USO's live performance in Rome at last month's LiveiXem: live synthesis under keyboard and tablet control, live processing of acoustic bass, plus a pair of baby-blue LEDs staring out at you from the dual Capybaras. USO (unidentified sound object) is Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi. more...

10 Jan 2007 — Harm Visser has won the 2007 Electronic Musician Editors' Choice award for his physical modelling toolboxes. Check out the toolbox he created (and continues to expand upon) for Kyma. more...

08 Jan 2007 — Scot Solida's new Christus and the Cosmonaughts album has just been made available as a digital download from Beta-lactam Ring Records as the full CD version of the original LP plus two additional bonus tracks. Solida describes the album as "utterly chocked to the brim with Kyma goodness." One of the tracks, "The Fractured Faithfull" was done entirely within Kyma, but no track was untouched by the Kyma/Capybara combo. Solida warns that "spinning the artwork on a turntable has been clinically proven to cause lethargy in children and dust mites." more...

05 Jan 2007 — Mimmo Galizia talks about the syncretization of roots music and computer music in the November/December issue of World Music Magazine in an article titled: "Electro-world: when hip hop, dance, and techno encounter the sounds of the world. The intrusion of the computer into world music." more...

19 Dec 2006 — Electronic Music Foundation invites individuals and nonprofit organizations with a professional interest in electronic music to join the EMF. Benefits include promotion of your events in Arts Electric, distribution of your recorded music at CDeMusic, an artist page at the EMF website, news on upcoming professional opportunities alerts, and discounts on CDs and software ordered through CDeMusic. more...

15 Dec 2006 — You can follow the development of Robert Jarvis' new installation "gr0w" on his blog. Over the course of a year, Jarvis will be learning about plants and making recordings in the garden. In the wider community, he will be talking with local gardeners on the themes of growth, aging, gardening, and life. Check out his Resource Links on Acoustic Emissions from Plants. more...

08 Dec 2006 — Composer Sascha Dikiciyan was featured in an online article describing the powerful hybrid live-orchestra/industrial score he composed with Cris Velasco for Ubisoft's Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Using everything from metal chains to complex Kyma-generated atmospheres, Dikiciyan created custom sound design and electronic elements to be layered in with Velasco's symphony orchestra plus Sanskrit-singing choir. An official soundtrack of the game is to be released as part of the collector's edition. For more details, see http://www.myth-games.com/news1923.htm more...

06 Dec 2006 — You can listen to Polynomial, Karl Richard's "Electronica/Techno/Experimental based within mathematical reasoning" project on his My Space website. Ranging from the truly Ky-"manic" Granular Acid to the dreamily algorithmic Mavis Dile's Smile, Rhythm in the Numbers, and the elegant alien minuet Slanet Paturn, Polynomial joins a distinguished lineage of composers who, over the ages, have sought to recreate the music of the spheres. more...

01 Dec 2006 — Microgravity, Seth Talley's compelling exploration of how the human mind reacts to the isolation of space, won two awards at the First Annual 2006 Science Fiction Short Film Festival (SFSFF) at the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) in February, and was chosen to open for Terry Gilliam's Tideland in September at Fantastic Fest in Austin.

As a series of equipment failures conspire to isolate cosmonaut Enika in orbit around the moon, she begins to lose her sense of time, the ability to distinguish between dreaming and waking states, and her confidence in her own abilities to maintain the thin shell separating her from the absolute vacuum outside. David Sanders directed and also did the cinematography; Seth Talley wrote the screenplay, and used Kyma in creating the sounds for both the film and the trailer. more...

30 Nov 2006 — Sound designer/composer Harm Visser announces the release of his new Kyma Physical Modeling Toolkit, a collection of Kyma Sounds based on modal synthesis. According to Visser, "What makes this toolkit special is the integration with the Kyma environment; for example, you can use the CrossFilter to model the body of an instrument, and you have endless possibilities for creating excitation signals and developing tables for non-linear string and bore behavior." The toolkit comes with a large library of instruments, ranging from guitars, eastern plucked strings (like the sitar), to a large number of wind instruments (saxophone, shakuhashi, etc) and keyboard instruments (clavichord, clavinet, Hammond, etc). You can hear demos of the new sounds (sequenced by Harm Visser plus a few performed live on the Continuum by Edmund Eagan at http://www.hvsynthdesign.com/kymax.php. more...

28 Nov 2006 — Jörg Lensing's Cinema/TV students—Christiane Buchmann, Leif Thomas and Matthias Heuser—have won the Newcomer Prize in the Sound Design category of the European Film Music Awards, presented in a ceremony at the culmination of SoundTrack_Cologne 3.0, the Cologne Congress for Music and Sound in Film and Media. The prize was for the sound design on a short animated film entitled Zasucanec, which the students realized in Professor Lensing's course on Auditive Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Dortmund, Germany. The jury describe the sound track as "vivid, entertaining, surprising and funny" as well as "very precise and synchronized with the action." They also noted "the sophisticated way of dealing with backgrounds and dynamic elements and the symbiosis of music and sounds." more...

22 Nov 2006 — Hamilton Sterling used Kyma to create believably kitschy whooshes for the television news scenes in Chris Guest's new comedy For Your Consideration, a sendup of the Academy Awards starring political humorist and 'Spinal Tap' bassist Harry Shearer. more...

22 Oct 2006 — Film composer Tobias Enhus used Kyma to score a TV spot for UK mobile phone network O2. Unusual in its lack of either voice-over or sound effects, the hypnotic combination of images and music has been airing in the UK for the past two years and has even inspired a popular ringtone. All drums were synthesized in Kyma, and the reverse shaker sound was generated by Enhus' patch called ReGrain. An arpeggiated bell was generated with Synclavier FM, the bass drop is from his analog modular synth, and the female vocal is what Enhus calls his "canned wife" vocal samples performed by his wife Marissa (who happens to be a professional vocalist and composer), and resynthesized in Kyma under control of a Max Mathews Radio Baton. more...

20 Oct 2006 — Sound designer Frank Kruse used Kyma to create organic backgrounds for Tom Tykwer's new film Perfume—The Story of a Murderer. Kruse writes that "Kyma was a cool tool in creating 5.0 ambiences that are static in a way but start moving if you listen closely" in the naturalistic soundscape of this sensual and disturbing film. Starring Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman, the film will be released in the USA in December, 2006. more...

14 Oct 2006 — Each autumn, Monarch butterflies undertake a lengthy migration from Canada, across the entire United States, to arrive in central Mexico where they spend the winter in the pine forests. Papalotzin, a new film tracking the journey of Francisco Vico Gutiérrez as he follows the Monarch Migration path in his glider (painted in Monarch colors). Jack Morgan Rosete composed the score which combines elements of world music (live vocals and instrumentation) with experimental electronics, including some live segments performed with a Lemur/Virus TI and Kyma synthesis algorithms. Rosete used CapyTalk logical expressions and generative patches for glitchy beats (mimicking the 'imagined' sound of a butterfly flapping its wings). He also designed a Kyma patch for morphing from one chord to the next; assuming that each note is a separate voice on his Virus TI, the algorithm controls the pitch change of each voice to arrive at the new chord position with some swarm code from the library adding a butterfly-like variation. The results give a sense of dreamy floating. Rosete writes, "The score was a great success, everyone loved it, and I have plenty to thank Kyma for!" Papalotzin premieres at the Morelia Film Festival in October. more...

06 Oct 2006 — Listen to Mimmo Galizia's remix of Peter Gabriel's Shock the Monkey at RealWorld. Galizia used the original vocals, bass, strings, trumpet, sax, guitar, strings, marimba, and prophet, resynthesizing them in Kyma. The drum section is new and is made up of several loops using electronic and acoustic drum samples including some Southern Italian circular hand drums made with dried goat skin. If you like what you hear, vote for Mimmo in the remix competition. And watch the RealWorld website for an announcement of the next remix competition. more...

23 Sep 2006 — Scott Holden's debut album, SCOTT, demonstrates that Kyma is not just for sound effects. Kyma was used throughout the album for subtle processing that enhances rather than contradicts the raw bluesy style. Kyma connoisseurs will appreciate the chopper applied to the guitar part on "Spooky" and the swarm-following harmonizer on "No Stone Unturned". More subtle and more pervasive is the Inverse Compressor that Holden designed and applied to all the drums, and the multiband compressor with random settings that he employs as a permanent part of his guitar effects loop. His lightly processed vocals are routed through cascading compressors and delay filters in Kyma and his custom-designed harmonizer is so realistic that most listeners will assume it is multi-tracking. more...

20 Sep 2006 — Camille Troillard has just released OSCulator 1.0, an application for interfacing to Kyma via Open Sound Control. Edmund Eagan tested the Osculator to ensure compatibility with the Jazz Mutant Lemur multi-touch control panel. Camille has made OSCulator available as a shareware application. more...

12 Sep 2006 — EdmundEagan has just finished a redesign of his Twelfthroot website. Visit his website to check out sound recordings and videos of Eagan performing Kyma live under the control of his Continuum fingerboard and Lemur touch panel. more...

10 Sep 2006 — Enrico Barbaro is using Kyma in PostalArt, a web-based sound collaboration with Francesco Albano. The idea is to post musical "seeds" on the website and to follow a collaborative process of disassembling, reassembling, evolving and composing based on those seeds. You can listen in on some of the works-in-progress here. Check back over time to hear how the works evolve into finished pieces. more...

01 Sep 2006 — Sascha Dikiciyan made use of Kyma in his music for the new SPlinter Cell 4 videogame for Ubisoft. He has also been using it for some of his remix work under the name of Toksin on remixes of BT, deepsky, Destiny's Child and others. For examples visit http://www.toksin.com or http://www.myspace.com/toksin. more...

15 Aug 2006 — You'll turn heads when you step out in the latest Kyma fashion statement: designer tees by graphic-designer and Kyma afficionado Taylor Deupree. In your choice of a white and pale orange signal flow silhouette or white and turquoise Tau icon printed on elegant charcoal gray 100% cotton, you'll be quite the conversation piece as you stride through airports, clubs, classes, or across the stage (and all for only 8 dollars)! Order a shirt for yourself or for someone you love at the website above. more...

15 Jun 2006 — Paul Berg has updated his AC Toolbox to work with the new AV/C firmware for the Kyma FireWire Interface. The new AC Toolbox is also compatible with the older firmware. For more information on algorithmic composition with the AC Toolbox 4.2.2, visit: http://www.koncon.nl/ACToolbox more...

14 Jun 2006 — Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi have released USO (Unidentified Sound Object), an exuberant journey through spaces (literal and abstract) populated by elementary particles organizing themselves into increasingly complex structures. The sound quality is superb and it's obvious that Placidi and Milani share a genuine love for sound exploration. Listen on your DVD player or with VLC media player for the 4-channel surround sound experience! You can hear an excerpt on U.S.O. Project, and order the DTS Music Disc from CDeMUSIC or Music Zeit Download Platform (formats: mp3/flac). more...

10 Jun 2006 — Satisfy your nonlinear appetites with Matteo Milani's Non Linear Food (NLF) sample library, available online at http://powerfx.com/, CD/DVD Shop > Downloadable CDs. more...

5 Jun 2006 — Robert Jarvis handed marbles to school children telling them, "This is a magic stone. When you hold this stone in your hand and close your eyes, you will hear something." Magically, the children did hear things--sounds in the environment they had never noticed before. Magic Stones the CD is itself a magic stone; once you've heard the "environmental" sounds on this disk organized as music you hear the world in a new way. Jarvis' music exemplifies Jacques Attali's prediction that the future economy of music will be based on the process of composing, not on finished pieces or objects; Jarvis always engages the "audience" (ranging from professional musicians to children) in the process of composing. Available on Motile as a download or as a physical CD. more...

22 May 2006 — Ambrose Field’s new studio album Storm has been awarded an Honorary Mention at the 2006 Prix Ars Electronica in Linz Austria. Sargasso describes the album as "High impact, over-the-top sonic grandeur meets blistering metal guitar solos..." more...

18 Apr 2006 — Tom Holkenborg was interviewed in Remix in connection with his new album, Today. When asked about Kyma, he describes it as: ...basically a complete empty box, and it can be whatever you want it to be—you can program a patch that turns a guitar into a vocal, or you can morph in between four, five or six different sounds, in real time, to make new sounds. I definitely took the processing of my guitars and vocals to a whole new level that I've never been to before. more...

06 Apr 2006 — Kyma Sound Design Software Now Available as a Universal Binary for Intel Macs...Good news for Mac laptop users: Kyma runs as much as 3.3 times faster on the MacBook Pro than it does on the popular 1 GHz G4 PowerBook laptops. more...

14 Mar 2006 — Enrico Barbaro used his Wacom tablet to perform Kyma live to picture for a new TV commerical for Luna Park Madrid. The video for the commercial was realized by David Alcalde of Barcelona. Barbaro played (and recorded in Protools) several of his favorite Kyma presets using the Wacom pen and Motormix while watching the picture. He used a mix of ChaosClicks and drones in the intro, GranularClassicNoSpectrum, THX and BrassGong for the elevator, and FMdrones and various more all over for the ambient, wind, metal monster and ending. Barbaro is pleased with the results, describing the sound as "very organic and dynamic". more...

04 Mar 2006 — Hamilton Sterling and the rest of the sound design team for Speilberg's War of the Worlds won the MPSE Golden Reel for Best Sound Effects and Foley Editing. Among the many effects created by Sterling were the sounds of the tripods emerging from the ground (created using the Kyma Tau editor). more...

14 Feb 2006 — Symbolic Sound Corporation has developed a new technique for morphing, warping, and synthesizing sound in the Kyma X.3 sound design environment. The Tau and its accompanying graphic editor provide tools for creating natural sounding multi-way audio morphs, insane transmogrifications, and mysterious synthesized effects. more...

12 Feb 2006 — Sound designer Matteo Milani's podcast Kyma Sonic World Episode 1 is ready for live streaming at Graphicalsound. Episode 1 is a compilation featuring processed "station IDs" and excerpts from Carla Scaletti's Frog Pool Farm, Matteo Milani's Organic rhythm, Edmund Eagan's Tidal Pool, Mimmo Galazia's Seven, Sylvain Kepler's Nucleopolis, Lorenzo Brusci's The Fury, Beppe Mangione's Creature n.3, and Milani's Xen dripping. To take part in Episode 2, respond to the invitation here. more...

11 Feb 2006 — Founded by composer, author, and teacher Joel Chadabe, the EMF (Electronic Music Foundation) is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to both the history and the creative future of electronic music. The EMF promotes electronic music by producing concerts, publishing CDs, and disseminating information. Their list of over 1400 subscribers reads like a "who's who" of electronic music pioneers and future stars. If you would like to support the work of the EMF while at the same time promote your events, publish your recordings, and/or get discounts on music and software available from the EMF, visit their site. more...

10 Feb 2006 — Arcana, a compilation album soon to be released by Interchill, features two new tracks by Greg Hunter (Dubsahara). Of interest to both world music enthusiasts and psy-oriented listeners, the Dubsahara remix of Kaya Project's One God Dub is the result of a recent collaboration between East-West fusion genre producers Seb Taylor and Greg Hunter. And the Dubsahara tune, Harmonic Density features Kris Weston (formerly known as Thrash) who worked with Greg during the early days of the Orb. more...

06 Feb 2006 — Paris-based sound designer Frederick Attal has recently updated the DIEZE Sound Design website. Check out his impressive list of film credits here. more...

04 Jan 2006 — Seven Animations, a compilation of Dennis Miller's visual compositions with Kyma sound tracks, is now available on NetFlix. (Note, this feature is not yet rated; some scenes may be too abstract for more literal-minded viewers). more...

03 Jan 2006 — Robert Jarvis' installation Disappear is the winner of the 2005 British Composer Award in the New Media Category. You can listen to a recording of the London awards ceremony as it was originally broadcast live on BBC 3. Imagine "The Academy Awards" for new music and you will get an idea of what this is like. The New Media Award is announced about 45 minutes into the program and you can hear Robert's acceptance speech and an excerpt of some of his "endangered sounds". For a description of Disappear, see here. more...

02 Jan 2006 — Check out Garth Paine's discussions of life, art, and the weather at his new blog: http://www.activatedspace.com/blog/ more...

23 Nov 2005 — Composer Robert Jarvis has a new CD coming out this month on the Motile label. Entitled Magic Stones, it comprises a series of compositions related to time and place, including the Disappear installation soundtrack and the eponymous Irish installation: Magic Stones. more...

21 Nov 2005 — This is one of those rare opportunities that occur only once every 20 years or so. Due to the regrettable closing of the Tape Gallery, Pete Johnston (aka the master of the Kyma morph) may be available for a short period of time to do freelance work before he is hired by another studio full time. If you or someone you know could use an amusing and/or astounding audio morph for a film, an album, an advertisement or a new game, this might be just the right time to get it. To discuss the possibilities, contact Pete at mailto:pdj AT blueyonder DOT co DOT uk more...

20 Nov 2005 — Edmund Eagan has posted a video demo of himself controlling Kyma with both a Lemur and a Continuum. Ed is using the MIDI outputs of the Lemur to control the parameters of Kyma Sounds. more...

17 Nov 2005 — Edmund Eagan's Distance Blue (a series of live performances on Continuum controlling Kyma) is now available on a CD, appropriately disguised in packaging that resembles a tin of mints! To audition mp3 excerpts and place your order, go to http://www.twelfthroot.com/recordings and click on the link to Distance Blue. While you're there, check out the link to the audio samples from Recombinant 01, Eagan's all-Kyma compilation DVD featuring 5 channel surround mixes of music by a variety of artists using Kyma. more...

11 Nov 2005 — The directors of The Tape Gallery, known to Kyma users worldwide as the home of audio morphing, have reluctantly chosen to cease operations earlier this week. Managing Director Lloyd Billing started the now-famous Soho post production facility nearly 25 years ago, building it up from a single room to one of the leading post production houses in London. Tape Gallery's Technical Manager Pete Johnston is known to Kyma users as the author of the popular CrossFilter module and as the undisputed master of the audio morph.

We will miss the energy, the humor, and the innovative ideas of The Tape Gallery. But we know that the entrepreneurial spirit and creative talents of its individual employees and directors will continue to enhance the London post production community. We look forward to hearing what they will do next! more...

14 Oct 2005 — Composer Tobias Enhus has just finished scoring The Matrix: Path of Neo game for Atari. In conjunction with the game's release, Warner Brothers will release a soundtrack album and a music video with Crystal Method superimposed into the game. more...

10 Oct 2005 — Kemal Amarasingham at dSonic used Kyma to create some of the music and sound effects for Mumbo Jumbo's Luxor , a small game that is breaking big records as the fastest selling downloadable game ever (over 1 million downloads so far). more...

20 Sep 2005 — Kemal and Simon Amarasingham at dSonic are using Kyma to generate ambient soundscapes for an upcoming UbiSoft release entitled Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, under development by Arkane Studios and scheduled for release in summer 2006. Dark Messiah of Might & Magic allows players to immerse themselves in the legendary Might and Magic universe through character animation, advanced AI, real-world physics, shader-based rendering, and what the Amarasingham brothers describe as their "most creepy ambient sounds yet!"

dSonic also used Kyma to create adaptive music, sound effects and ambient soundscapes for Creative Lab's new X-fi soundcards, showcasing Creative Lab's game audio engine ISACT. dSonic's work will be used in a patch for Unreal Tournament 2004 that gives the player feedback and some very cool real-time surround effects. more...

17 Sep 2005 — Tobias Enhus composed the score for David J Burke's Edison, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September. Kevin Spacey, Morgan Freeman, Justin Timberlake, LL Cool J, Dylan McDermott, and Piper Perabo star in this neo noir film set in an imaginary everytown called Edison, where each character's moral stance falls somewhere between what is "just" and what is merely "legal". For the score, Tobias linked the utopian, highbrow surface of Edison with its gritty crime-ridden underbelly by using the same rhythmic motive for their respective themes, but with starkly contrasting orchestration and processing. He created algorithmic sequences in Kyma, notated them, and had them performed by a symphony orchestra and a classical vocalist to get the raw material for the "highbrow" theme. For the gritty reality theme, he used rhythmic acoustic percussion processed through the CrossFilter and Kyma-sequenced filters. In the end it is difficult to distinguish between what is processed, what is synthesized, and what sounds originated in the physical world. more...

13 Sep 2005 — Fell made heavy use of his Wacom tablet to control Kyma in restructuring the timbre of some drums on Crashed Emotionally, a track from his latest release: Between Octavia and Laguna. Several other songs on the album feature Kyma manipulation and mutation of source samples. You can purchase the 64k mp3 album for $2.00 at the website. All releases are delivered via a ZIP file including album tracks in MP3 format plus PDFs of album artwork. more...

12 Sep 2005 — Listen to Yasushi Yoshida's first Continuum + Kyma performance at: http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~MZ2Y-YSD/realaudio/additiveContinuum.mp3 more...

01 Sep 2005 — Distance Blue, a new album by Continuum-virtuoso Edmund Eagan, serves up some cool blue sounds for the end of summer. With each track named after a shade of blue from a paint sample chart, the sounds range from airy string-like harmonics to delicate reeds, electric guitars, plucked strings with vocal formants, thereminish swoops, underwater piano pings, metallic grains, alien sitars, computerish blips, and microtonal scales of unknown ethnography, all drenched in delicious reverbs and mysterious ambiences.

Eagan's combination of Kyma with Continuum comprises a new musical instrument in its own right. The sound-generating algorithms are variations on a plucked harmonic resonator run through Johnston-CrossFilters mixed and sometimes processed by additional Crossfilters. Eagan writes: "Having this Continuum/Kyma system allows me to write music in a much more improvisational way then I normally would in the structured environment of typical computer music generation. The result for me is a very gratifying musical experience, akin to surfing (riding the waves on the edge of chaos)." more...

30 Jul 2005 — Seven Animations by Dennis Miller is now available on a DVD from Iota Center. The seven works in this collection represent Miller's output over the six-year period from 1999 to 2005. Best described as visual music, these animations reveal the ways in which Miller applies the techniques and sensibilities of music composition to sequences of abstract images. Many of the pieces are supported by Kyma-generated sound tracks that parallel the visual textures. Iota is a non-profit arts organization dedicated to preserving and promoting the art of light and movement. more...

29 Jul 2005 — Fred Szymanski's Flume is a new work that was commissioned by Sub Rosa for inclusion on the compilation: An anthology of noise & electronic music / Third / A chronology 1952 - 2004 on Sub Rosa SR220. Utilizing iterative, nonlinear synthesis techniques, Szymanski continues his earlier investigations into the manipulation of sounds at the particle level (the Nozzle series) and expands to include convergent-divergent motions at the macro-level. Guy Marc Hinant describes the music in this anthology as "The first traces of an inevitably revolutionary music: electronic music, created ex nihilo, out of nothing (and therefore to be entirely invented)." more...

28 Jul 2005 — Ben Phenix has posted some examples of ambient textures that he generated using the new Pete Johnston CrossFilter. Serene, peaceful, and a bit scary, the sound is generated by inserting external processing into the response side of the CrossFilter. Phenix routed the response through a series of serial and parallel processing including a Lexicon PCM-80, analog delays, and an MS-20 filter. But don't just take our word for it, listen to the results. more...

14 Jul 2005 — Michael Atherton and Garth Paine have been using Pete Johnston's new CrossFilter algorithm flat out nonstop since it came down the wire and onto Garth's laptop. They've already made some new pieces — Automated, Robotic percussion and Live processing and Turkish OUD and Live Processing — all available for your listening pleasure. more...

13 Jul 2005 — Have you ever yearned to go on a journey? Something completely out of the ordinary? Do sound and music play an important role in your life? Do you have three days time, a large curiosity and the courage to experience the unusual?

Make the fearless step into another medium where the sum total of your activities will be to COMPOSE (in ancient Chinese, this word is roughly translated "more time for one's self").

THE EYE LEADS HUMANS INTO THE WORLD, THE EAR LEADS THE WORLD INTO HUMANS. Composers are experts at evaluating, judging, shaping proportion with respect to the future, and knowing how to strategically select or reject—in short, THE COMPOSER CREATES FORM THROUGH DECISIONS!

Take a three day expedition into the world of sound with a composer as your tour guide. Enter the composition workshop of Bruno Liberda. For more information, see his website! more...

12 Jul 2005 — A CD of Agostino Di Scipio's Audible Ecosystems, Hörbare Ökosysteme, is now available on Edizion RZ, Berlin. All featured works involve live signal processing or synthesis with Kyma. The full title is Hörbare Ökosysteme: Live elektronische Kompositionen 1993-2005 Edizion RZ 10015. more...

30 Jun 2005 — Dennis Miller composes with sound and light. Now you can see and hear his computer-generated animations on line at his website. These animations (many of which include Kyma-generated sound tracks) are true visual music. His newest work, Cross Contours, uses image and sound to evoke a fibrous, feathery texture. more...

29 Jun 2005 — Master and Commander team, Richard King and Hamilton Sterling have reunited for the sound design on Stephen Spielberg's War of the Worlds. Opening worldwide on 29 June 2005, the sound design is already drawing praise from critics, for example:

* As sight, the alien invasion is dazzling; as sound, it will turn your bones to jelly. Nathan Lee, The New York Sun

* The film is a triumph of production and sound design with a restrained use of computer graphics. Frank Gabrenya, The Columbus Dispatch

* [T]he sound design of the picture is among its greatest strengths. Soren Anderson, The News Tribune

* The only moments more frightening than the vicious attacks, aided and abetted by superior sound effects, are the pools of quiet between each offensive. Christian Toto, The Washington Times more...

15 Jun 2005 — Ben Burtt and Matthew Wood created an ARP 2600-emulator in Kyma to do some of the droid voices in the final installment of the Star Wars trilogy Revenge of the Sith. Kyma also was used to generate eerie ambiences and backgrounds throughout the film. more...

01 Jun 2005 — In June 2005, Byl Briant will be publishing two sample packs by Lorenzo Brusci and Matteo Milani from the Non Linear Food (NLF) sound library. Featuring electronic loops, e-percussion, active drones, beat oriented textures, a HYPER_DRUM_SET, SURROUNDSCAPES (5.0 ready-to-go textures), and DIGI_EVENTS (alarms, buttons, etc.), the four gigabyte collection was produced using Kyma and ProTools. Here's a one minute demo. more...

01 Jun 2005 — a reconstruction of the album "Awaawa" by the japanese band Eisi. (noble records). Eisi is a 3-piece outfit consisting of vocals, guitar, trumpet, upright bass, and some synthesizer. sort of dreamy, experimental pop. using extensive track and soundfile data from the original album, i recreated the entire thing using my own digital style and practices. more...

01 Jun 2005 — Carlos Alberto Augusto's new piece Cine-Lisboa will be included on Lisboa.Reloaded, a new DVD to be released this summer on the Real Ambient label. For more background on Augusto's work, visit his website. more...

18 May 2005 — Simon and Kemal Amarasingham at dSonic had a hand in several new products that were demonstrated at the 2005 E3 Entertainment Expo and Conference May 18-20 in Los Angeles. Kyma-generated monster sounds can be heard in Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Kyma can also be heard in two yet-to-be-announced Namco titles, and a new title shown at Ubisoft's pavilion. more...

08 May 2005 — ISKRA3 (psi 05.02) is scheduled for release at the beginning of May, 2005 on Evan Parker's Psi label. Described as "revolutionary improvised music for trombone and live computer processing," the album features Robert Jarvis (Kyma) improvising with Paul Rutherford (trombone). Himself a trombonist, Jarvis performs regularly with Rutherford as part of the London Improvisers Orchestra, but on this particular CD, Jarvis performs only on Kyma, using it as a musical instrument. The entire album is strictly improvised—no discussion about the music before or during the recording. You can order it online at EMANEM: "compact discs of unadulterated new music for people who like new music unadulterated". more...

06 May 2005 — Visual Noise, a short film by Barry Lewis and Robert Jarvis is now playing on the Canon Europe site. Focusing in on the details amid the clutter of everyday visual signs and symbols in an urban landscape, Barry Lewis' photographs open our eyes to the extraordinary within the ordinary while Robert Jarvis' sound track opens our ears to the ignored or neglected sounds that make up our everyday environment. You'll never view cycling icons in the same way again! more...

05 May 2005 — David Worrall has made his course notes on the physics and psychophysics of music available on the web. The notes are from a course he developed and expanded over a 15 year period from the early 1970's and used as an introductory course at the Australian Centre for the Arts and Technology at the Australian National University. more...

14 Apr 2005 — If you live in London, listen carefully the next time you hear an NHS (National Health Service) recruitment advertisement on the radio. When you hear a modem morphing into the sound of a heart monitor or an ambulance, you're hearing the handiwork of Pete Johnston at The Tape Gallery. The sonic transformation is intended to suggest that people should use the Internet to check for current job openings with the NHS. more...

01 Apr 2005 — Science fiction meets contemporary opera in these riveting video excerpts and images from The Wings of Daedalus, a multi-media opera by composer Maurizio Squillante and sound designer FedericoPlacidi. Cyborghian protheses by Stelarc and live vocal processing through Kyma blend with computer-generated images and live singers on stage in disturbingly beautiful scenes. The myth of Daedalus serves as a metaphor for humanity's self-enhancement through technology, through the group mind, and finally progressing to the spiritual realm of pure energy. Whether you are a fan of science fiction or a devotee of contemporary opera you will find these videos both fascinating and thought-provoking. more...

23 Mar 2005 — Check out some of the structured improvisations performed live by Garth Paine (Wacom Intuos tablet-controlled Kyma) and Michael Atherton (percussion, piano and hurdy-gurdy) at Garth Paine's website. The Sydney-Australia-based musicians stress that these are still rough mixes made during rehearsals as they gear up to do some live gigs. more...

22 Mar 2005 — A new Kyma update (Kyma X.15) provides support for two new Wacom pens (the AirBrush and the ArtPen), each of which provides an additional dimension of control: PenWheel and PenRotation, respectively. The new update also makes it possible to toggle between mouse-mode and Sound-control-mode and to switch from keyboard control to continuous controllers without having to edit the preferences. See the website for more details on the latest update (free to registered Kyma X owners). more...

21 Mar 2005 — Producer Oliver Lieb recently took questions submitted via the Internet in the Playpen. The well-regarded producer (Spicelab, S.O.L., Paragliders, et al.) answers questions about mastering, how to get signed, what inspires him, and what software/hardware he likes to use. When asked about his favorite synth, Lieb writes: "If you ask me what I really need is a perfect sounding room, soundproofed with several sound systems big and small and a computer, my hardware FX and my Kyma system (www.symbolicsound.com) that I am using excessively." more...

18 Mar 2005 — Using sound sources ranging from Buchla and Kyma to the utterances of an African Grey Parrot, the Crimson Twins have been exploring curious aural amusements since the early 1980s. Now you can peruse over three hours of their "peculiar yet endearing" tracks as MP3s at their web site. more...

13 Mar 2005 — You can listen to "Breakfast with blossom," an excerpt of LoLe #1, Musica Leggiadra by Letizia Renzini (vocal improvisations) and Lorenzo Brusci (composer/sound designer) at http://www.timet.org/downloads/lole.htm. While you are on the site, you can also read about the Timet project and consider becoming one of their guest composers: http://www.timet.org/guest/index.htm. more...

01 Mar 2005 — In Recombinant Art 01: Artists Using Kyma (RA01), producer Edmund Eagan has created a true 5-channel DVD-audio disk that you can listen to in stereo on your computer or play on a 6-channel DVD-player for the full surround audio experience. Beautiful both visually and sonically, RA01 was created entirely by artists using Kyma and is now available at CDeMUSIC. more...

24 Feb 2005 — Have a listen to Scot Solida's first experiments with the Graphire tablet as Kyma controller at http://www.olscratchrecordings.com/Sounds/Tablets_in_the_Timeline.mp3. The track was created using Kyma, a lap-steel guitar played with an E-bow, and the voice of Scot's son, Nigel. This track (along with a full-side-length track done entirely in Kyma) is to be released under the project name Christus & the Cosmonaughts by Beta-lactam Ring Records (http://www.blrrecords.com). Scot also used Kyma (along with Dotcom modular, Waldorf Microwave XTk, Moog Rogue, Nord G2, Hammond organ, and slide guitar) in the following track on Beta-lactam's MP3 site: http://blrrecords.com/mp3/blurr03_christus.mp3 more...

23 Feb 2005 — Graphicalsound announces the launch of a new podcast dedicated exclusively to the sonic world of Kyma (http://www.graphicalsound.com/Kyma_Sonic_World.html). A podcast is like a radio program that you download to your computer or mobile MP3 player. You can subscribe to podcast "feeds" just as you now subscribe to RSS news feeds on the Internet. Matteo Milani invites Kyma composers and sound designers to participate in the podcast as a way of making their work known to more people and, in the process, helping podcast pioneers build a new way of experiencing and disseminating sound! Listen to a pilot demo of the new podcast at: http://www.graphicalsound.com/podcast/Kyma_sonic_world.mp3 (size 37 MB). more...

01 Feb 2005 — Kyma used to make Greek Mythology creatures & magic spells come to life. more...

03 Jan 2005 — The editors of Electronic Musician magazine have named Kyma X the editors' choice for best sound design workstation of 2005! Check out the January 2005 issue for the full detail. Thanks EM, on behalf of everyone at Symbolic Sound and from Kyma sound designers and musicians everywhere! more...

01 Jan 2005 — Used Kyma for SFX design on new Tony/Ridley Scott production on CBS entitled "Numbers". more...

01 Jan 2005 — Kyma used to make other worldly voices & SFX for the Darkness movie trailer. more...

31 Dec 2004 — To help make this new year a happy one, Symbolic Sound presents the Kyma X.1 software update as a New Year's gift to registered Kyma X users! Kyma X.1 delivers its enhancements in threes: support for using a Wacom pen and tablet as a 3-dimensional control surface, 3 new kinds of oscillators, modules for turning presets into a 3-dimensional parameter subspace, plus other enhancements and improvements to the Kyma X interface. For full details, see Kyma X.1 Released. Happy New Year! May your 2005 be full of sound and music! more...

15 Oct 2004 — Supervising sound designer Claude Letessier and sound designer Michael Baird brought Kyma with them to Bangkok for 6 months of sound designing on the new Wong Kar Wai film: 2046. Letessier and Baird used Kyma primarily for generating backgrounds, moods, and atmospheres to set the tone for this sci-fi/romantic/drama dealing with the ideas of time, changelessness, and a train that can transport you to the year 2046 (the year in which, it is rumored, that change no longer occurs. But this cannot be verified since no one has ever come back from there... until the main character of this movie decides to return to the year 1966). Describing their use of Kyma, Letessier writes, "It truly inspired us and brought our craft to the next level!" 2046 had its world premiere at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival and will be released in the UK in October. more...

12 Oct 2004 — Scot Solida is participating in a gallery showing of art by underground musicians (other contributors include members of Coil, Current 93, Nurse With Wound and Legendary pink Dots). Along with the gallery showing is a special limited edition 10" acetate record. Kyma was used to do the vocal treatments on Solida's track under the project name "Christus and the Cosmonaughts." more...

10 Oct 2004 — Oliver Lieb has just finished the score for Alone in the Dark, a new film (to be released in October, 2004) based on the best-selling Atari video game series. In it, Edward Carnby (Christian Slater), a private investigator specializing in unexplainable supernatural phenomena, is about to learn that just because you don't believe in something doesn't mean it can't still kill you. Check out the creature effects at the movie web site. more...

08 Oct 2004 — Raise Your Voice (an optimistic film about a young girl from a small town who goes into a depression after losing her brother in a car accident but then finds redemption through music at a performing arts camp in LA) opened in theatres around the US on Friday. Hilary Duff is the headliner but the real star of the show is Kiwi, the quiet loner who uses his laptop to turn the sound of a dropped fork into a masterpiece. The brains behind the music come from Tobias Enhus of MachineHead, who brought his Kyma system and radio baton to the set and coached the young actor who plays Kiwi on how to perform musically convincing gestures using Max Mathew's Radio Baton. Filmed in an old church with smoke machines generating the ambience of a dusty school gymnasium, the final concert scene features 45 seconds of Kiwi's performance filmed by three cameras. The actual sound, though, was generated by Tobias who used his Radio Baton to control Kyma patches while synching to the filmed sequence. Listen for dropped-fork drum loops and glottal pulses stretched or compressed by a wave of the Radio Baton. Rumor has it that during the final concert sequence, you might even catch a glimpse of a certain black box on stage in between shots of audiences members beaming at each other and and nodding their heads to the music. This film promises to start a trend in the industry with Hollywood demanding brainy geeks who know their way around a DSP patch to play all future romantic leads. more...

05 Oct 2004 — Check out Edmund Eagan's latest live Continuum/Kyma performance: http://www.hakenaudio.com/Continuum/200/HakR213.html. There's a discussion of the algorithms and the meaning behind the music at EndlessSeaDiscuss. more...

01 Oct 2004 — Dennis H. Miller of Northeastern University has just completed his third hour of original High Definition animation for the MOOV channel, broadcast on the VOOM network, an all-HD national satellite network. Miller is using POVray and Cinema 4D for the animations and a variety of sources, including Kyma, for the music. more...

01 Sep 2004 — A five minute "mini-epic" called "No Chance to Dream" appears on the compilation EP See Beyond the Music, released by Beta-lactam Ring records. This very limited edition acetate disc is being issued to coincide with the gallery exhibit of the same name. Tracks by Edward Ka-Spel, Armchair Migraine Journey and Romulus/Remus are also included. My track appears under the project name "Christus and the Cosmonaughts". Kyma was used extensively to process vocals for a sort of "concret collage" effect. more...

31 Aug 2004 — On August 31 2004, BT won the Surround Sound Maverick Award for his work on the score for Monster. Released in Surround Sound, Monster was recognized for the use of "unusual instruments and an unusual mix, done by BT himself." A portion of the profits from the SMAs goes to We Are The Future. more...

28 Aug 2004 — The AC Toolbox is a Macintosh application to assist the algorithmic composition of music. Several models for defining musical events are included. In addition to MIDI input and output, the AC Toolbox can also produce text files suitable for use as data in other programs such as Csound.

The new version Version 4.1 is a native OS X application that includes support for Symbolic Sound's Kyma. All MIDI data for notes, controllers, and program changes can be routed via the Flame firewire interface directly to the Capybara. This allows the use of floating-point values for pitch and controller values. Details can be found in Tutorial 19 of Using the AC Toolbox (PDF). more...

02 Aug 2004 — Sound designer Bill Black has just finished two new demo reels (one in English and another in Japanese) which you can view online. The opening/closing titles feature vocal processing that he did in Kyma. Also viewable on Black's site is a new demo reel featuring the work of sound designer and Kyma-user Russell Brower. more...

23 Jun 2004 — You can listen to Synthia Payne's Voices in my head, a 9-minute mp3, at her website. According to Payne, a student of Peter Elsea at UC Santa Cruz, it's "made with 100% Kymalicious snacks." more...

20 Jun 2004 — Using an atomic force microscope (http://www.sst.ph.ic.ac.uk/photonics/intro/AFM.html), it's possible to 'touch' a cell with a nano probe, measuring oscillations in the cell membrane without destroying the cell. UCLA researcher James Gimzewski and his graduate student Andrew Pelling tried amplifying and listening to these oscillations through speakers and were astonished to discover that healthy yeast cells vibrate at audio rates (and that unhealthy cells split into inharmonic clusters of frequencies). For a "video"/slide show explanation, visit the web site of "The Singing Yeast Cell." (Some of the background music for the slide show comes from Cliff Martinez' and Tobias Enhus' Kyma-synthesized soundtrack for Narc). more...

15 Jun 2004 — Tobias Enhus composed the music for the amine prequel to Riddick: "Riddick Dark Fury" (it's the Animatrix to the Riddick Chronicles movie and picks up the story where "Pitch Black" left off).

Enhus also created Kyma surround ambiences for Pandemic Studios Full Spectrum Warrior game, which premiered at the E3 Expo, Los Angeles Convention Center, May 12-14. more...

01 Jun 2004 — A small-town girl (played by Hillary Duff) heads to Los Angeles for the summer to study at a school for the performing arts. But the real star of this show is the music nerd, Kiwi, who performs Radio-Baton-controlled Kyma in the final concert! Behind the scenes it's our own leading man, Tobias Enhus, who provided the instruments and dubbed in the electronic music track. more...

29 May 2004 — Greg Hunter's remix of "siliconectar" (Greg Hunter and CarlaScaletti) is being released on Dakini Records on May 29, 2004 as part of the LIVE@DAKINI NIGHTS compilation). Constructed as a continuous culture-morph from Celtic harp (Scaletti) to Egyptian harp and back again through an electronic space in between (with a rhythm track that evokes images of belly dancers holding candles), "siliconectar" was in fact accompanied by belly dancers holding candles when Greg performed it live in Japan last year. It opens with a Celtic harp (one with preternaturally long trills and infinite decay times care of Kyma's SampleCloud processing), evolves into hip-swaying tablas, through bubbly synths, into the Egyptian harp, back through resonant filter sweeps to a dream-harp-plus-breathy-flute-clouds (Hunter), and finally echoes backwards into filter sweeps and a supernaturally long reverberated decay. The CD comes with lots of images from the live event and includes contributions from artists Puff Dragon, Makyo, Karsh Kale, Ochi Brothers, Sevda, Ishq, and Rasiya in addition to Greg Hunter. (A "dakini" or "sky-dancer" is a goddess, a ghost, or an angel, depending upon where you grew up). more...

06 May 2004 — Musician/Remixer/Producer DC used Kyma for synthesis and processing on Confidential, the latest release by smooth jazz guitarist Peter White, and on Livin' Large, the latest release by saxophonist Euge Groove (Eros Ramazzotti, Tina Turner, Joe Cocker). On Peter White's album, listen in particular to Track 6: Lost Without Your Love, and pay close attention to Track 3: XXL on the Euge Groove album. DC's credits include the recent Grammy-Award-winning Just Chillin' by Norman Brown. more...

30 Apr 2004 — dSonic has just completed the creation of the music and sound FX for Zoo Tycoon 2, the sequel to one of Microsoft's biggest selling PC titles. It will be on display at Microsoft's booth at E3 in May (http://www.e3expo.com). Sound designers Kemal and Simon Amarasingham used Kyma for reworking and stretching out the raw animal recordings they were given in order to achieve more variety in the animal sounds. more...

25 Feb 2004 — After two years of work, Aurélia-Djehan Derungs and Laurent Mialon are releasing this CD+DVD project (begun on Sept 11th). Both versions offer a total of 2H20 of acousmatique electronic hardcore (with a 5+1 track), and more than 35 minutes of dreamlike videos, combined for a strange psychedelic travel that aims at bending the curve of space-time. The KYMA platform was used extensively to manipulate live-recorded natural sounds such as thunder, flies that landed on the microphone, fallen rocks or the grating of ski lifts. more...

14 Feb 2004 — Bill Hamel's remix of Seal's Get It Together (Warner Bros. Records) was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Remixed Recording category in February 2004. According to Hamel, "It had tons of Kyma treatments in it. I feel that this is why it stood out so much above most remixes last year!" Read more about Bill Hamel's work at the web site. more...

01 Feb 2004 — Joel Chadabe's CD, Many Times ... (the ellipsis is the name of the performer), features Benjamin Chadabe (bowed cymbals and gongs), Chris Mann (recitation), David Gibson (cello), Jan Williams (conga, djembé, and hand-held percussion), and Esther Lamneck (tárogató). Each performer interacts with different versions of Chadabe's Kyma live processing algorithms. more...

01 Feb 2004 — JoelNewport used Kyma to create a wintry mix of SFX for a TV advertisement produced for a Canadian ski resort. more...

01 Jan 2004 — Score composed with mainly Kyma (with a Radio Baton), Csound and MOTM Modular. Organic and Gritty! Should hit the theatres spring 2004

In this thriller, Val Kilmer plays Frank, a man who loses his memory after being shot in small desert town in New Mexico. As he tries to retrace his steps and figure out his true identity, Frank believes he may be part of a plot to assasinate the president. Sam Sheperd plays the town's shifty-eyed sheriff and Neve Campbell plays a woman claiming to be Frank's wife. more...

01 Jan 2004 — Composer Brian Transeau (BT) used 5.1 Kyma synthesis and processing on the sound track of this film, starring Academy-Award-winning actress Charlize Theron. BT's tense score includes granular processing and GrainCloud pads synthesized in Kyma. In particular, he says to listen for the "insane" granulation on Hurdy Gurdy during the the first murder scene. more...

01 Jan 2004 — "january" is a continuation of the ideas of my cd "stil." (12k, 2002). Where "stil." made extensive use of repetition, "january", with a base built from short loops and fragmented sounds, adds a layer of randomness and live elements. Kyma was used extensively in the sound design for creating odd harmonics, fragmenting, chopping and looping. more...

14 Nov 2003 — As one of two sound effects editors working on the new Peter Weir film, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, I was charged by the supervising sound editor, Richard King, with creating and cutting all of the sound effects for the storm. Though my cutting work included two additional reels as well as updating all of the effects tracks and predubs through myriad changes, the storm sequence was the most challenging and most rewarding work of my career.

As most people know, a final track is made up of many elements (see Richard's interview with NPR), tracks that are combined to form predubs like wind, ocean, water, ship creaks, and specific sync effects. To this can be added design elements. One idea that Mr. Weir wanted to pursue was the unique sound of the wind in the rigging, an idea he found in a remarkable documentary of the last tall sailing ship to round Cape Horn. In this silent film shot in 1929, the narrator describes the wind in the rigging as sounding like a thousand animals screaming.

A thousand animals screaming: the problem is not so much in the execution, as in potentially losing the realistic quality of the previously recorded, pitched, shaped, and cut material. Wind is a delicate thing, chaotic in frequency and amplitude. In order to find a mix with the design elements, there had to be a way of tracking what had already been predubbed in order that the mixer, D.M. Hemphill, could bring in the design sounds without them calling attention to themselves.

As a reader of the ancients, my first thought was of the siren's song, the harmonic lure that made Odysseus bind himself to the mast for fear of steering his ship into the rocks. That ancient sailor's call, the thrumming melodies of the lines and the sheets, these are what inspired my approach. First I tried for a physical effect. Most sound editors prefer to start gathering their sound effects in the organic world. Richard had recorded many wind effects working with tangible objects like ropes and grills, and to accompany this I tried recording my lyre harp to produce tuned harmonies. Placing microphones inside the sound box and driving high speed with the engine off down a mountain road while holding the lyre out the roof of my car was thrilling in more ways than one. And while this produced an interesting effect that was musical in nature, the physics of pitch shifting this into a gigantic aeolian harp of line and rigging weren't there.

Still a learning student of Kyma (I hope forever), I called Carla and Kurt and asked for advice on how to properly track, with both frequency and amplitude, the predub of the winds. The sequence, being long, needed to be processed live. Though I had worked with various vocoded sounds, using the wind to modulate choral and animal samples, what I really wanted, at least as an element, was that giant aeolian harp. Carla sent me some wonderful Sound examples of resonant filters at play, and these gave me ideas on how to refine my approach. The combination of these elements I then mixed in ProTools, keeping some separate, and combining others, tracking all with the previously recorded mix.

The wonderful thing about working with Kyma is that, like any good art form, the more you do it, the more ideas it generates. That is the gift of Carla and Kurt. Three cheers for Symbolic Sound. Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!

Hamilton Sterling is a sound designer, director, and Greek history buff. more...

05 Nov 2003 — Feedback granulation in the Hel Club sequence. more...

01 Nov 2003 — This music grew out of a late November 2002 performance and studio improvisation in NYC. Deupree's Stil. and Willits' Folding and The Tea had just been released on 12k, and a release party had been scheduled at Tonic in NYC. Willits flew in town for the show. The night was beautiful, and music was recorded. Later that week, Willits and Deupree set up a processing system in Taylor's Brooklyn studio. It consisted of Willits' guitar, folding through his own software system, and then resynthesized through Deupree's Kyma processing. Jamming late into the night turned into hours of raw material. Deupree and Willits then edited the recordings into 10 track foundations, and finalized the tracks individually, 3000 miles apart. The final CD contains excerpts from the live recordings at Tonic in NYC, and their favorite finished pieces from the original studio collaboration. You can trace each artist's solo approach to performance in their respective live sets, and hear how those methods, sounds, and processes blend together within the studio improvisations. The collaboration is a hybrid of Deupree's keen timing and sensitivity to the microprocessing of sounds, and Willits' folded guitar playing and flowing harmonic sensibilities. The CD drifts into new sonic territory for both artists, and establishes a foundation for Willits' new melodic arrangements and Deupree's growing interest in live instrumentation. more...

10 Aug 2003 — With Spectrality, Disney animator Marcus Hobbs continues his use of Kyma to create microtonal melodies using ancient scales against a backdrop of acid techno beats. more...

19 Jul 2003 — Lorenzo Brusci announces an MP3 version of a timet compilation called COMPILATIONE: Classicism Meets the Beat: An Electronic Tuscan Scene, available on the web. (Kyma was used on two of the pieces). You may freely use this music under a EFF legal license. To support the timet project, order their CDs! more...

16 Jul 2003 — An obese policeman falls in love with a beautiful young girl but he knows that she killed her uncle. He strikes a bargain with her that he won't turn her in if she agrees to eat dinner with him every night for one year. (He is trying to lose weight because the doctor told him he has 2 years to live unless he thins down). There is a graphic novel of the same name. Attal used Kyma for the sound design during a climactic 3 minute dream sequence at the end of the movie. Sounds were drawn from the film itself—a scream, a cry that is 6 octaves down, metallic sounds from the Foley, layers of quad Kyma sound design mixed in ProTools. more...

18 Apr 2003 — On April 18, 2003, Chris Guest (of This is Spinal Tap fame) released this film, centered on the folk music groups of the early 60s. A Mighty Wind is based on the premise of a memorial concert celebrating the life of a folk music promoter by reuniting some of his most famous acts (some of whom haven't performed together for 30 years). Sound designer HamiltonSterling used Kyma to do a manually-controlled decode of the MS stereo production recordings that were made during the number of impromptu rehearsal scenes leading up to the final concert. This allowed him to cross-fade from stereo music to mono dialogue within a shot without a jarring change in perspective (helped along by some stereo backgrounds). Sterling also used Kyma to record all the crowds in quad and 5.0. For the backstage scenes, he played back the concert material through various sources and re-recorded it in the original dressing rooms and backstage areas for a you-are-there verisimilitude. Kyma was also used to create the rapid on-board car bys and car idle bys during the scenes of travelling through New York. more...

08 Apr 2003 — Peter Comley and Tawm Perkowski used Kyma for the sound design on the new XBox game, MechAssault. As one might expect from an action game centered on 40-foot-tall robots, explosions are large and frequent. The game is a near-constant barrage of debris, dirt, and flames being cast about with extreme force. Most of these sounds were created with Foley and recorded sound elements. However, to convey the advanced technology behind the weapons found in the Battletech universe (and the sheer chaos of the explosions) Peter and Tom wanted lots of unusual synthetic elements... so naturally they turned to Kyma. more...

21 Mar 2003 — Warner Bros. Dreamcatcher opened in theatres March 21, 2003, but most of the buzz has been centered on the 9-minute animated "short" that was paired with it.  The Final Flight of Osiris, a fusion of CG animation and Japanese anime, serves as a link between the Wachowski brothers' The Matrix and its much anticipated sequel The Matrix Reloaded, released in May, 2003. Included on the soundtrack is music by Ben Watkins and his Kyma-ite collaborator Greg Hunter (aka Juno Reactor). Listen for Kyma-generated granular feedback, vowel filters and surround effects courtesy of Greg and his transatlantic Capybara. more...

11 Mar 2003 — Larry Fritts presented a paper at SEAMUS on the Iowa Musical Instrument Samples (MIS) database, featuring 15 orchestral instruments recorded in an anechoic chamber as mono 16-bit AIFF files. These samples are freely available online. more...

03 Mar 2003 — Some of the evil sounds designed by Mathis Nitschke for the film Resident Evil are to be included on a new 7 CD set available from Hollywood Edge. The Evil FX sound library includes such all-time favorites as: 59 KYMA ZOMBIES 1-10, 56 PROCESSED BEAST 1, 86 KYMA HELICOPTER, 88 KYMA SCANNER, 89 KYMA MONK STORM, 91 KYMA RADIO DEATH, and more. more...

15 Feb 2003 — New World Records announces the release of Eric Chasalow's Left to His Own Devices (catalog #80601-2), featuring seven of his electro-acoustic works. Two in particular, Left to His Own Devices and Suspicious Motives, pay homage to his Columbia-Princeton mentors; the former is built from vocal samples of Milton Babbitt and the sound of the RCA synthesizer while the latter incorporates two motives from Mario Davidovsky's music — primarily the opening to Synchronisms #6. Chasalow writes, "In spite of my long history with electronic music, the technology is not my focus." Of related interest: #80440-2 Eric Chasalow - Over the Edge. more...

29 Jan 2003 — Cliff White used the mastering Sound posted to the Kyma Forum by David McClain as part of the mastering process on Deovolente's latest CD, Vision Quest. Powerful and uncompromising in their lyrics, Deovolente's musical style could be described as a form of heavy metal, progressive rock, experimental electronic, new wave alternative rock. more...

24 Jan 2003 — Super Sucker (from Purple Rose Films) opened in selected theaters January 24, 2003. Starring the "homemaker's little helper," a vacuum cleaner attachment whose voice was created by Joel Newport entirely in Kyma (with the help of a feather duster and a spinning bicycle wheel), the film was voted best comedy of the year by audiences at the HBO Comedy Film Festival in Aspen Colorado. Rumor has it that the Homemaker's Little Helper may be in the running for an Oscar nomination in the 'best supporting household appliance' category—the first time in the academy's history that this award would be awarded to a mechanical device. more...

08 Jan 2003 — Narc, a brutal story of undercover narcotics cops and the relativity of truth choreographed to an avant-garde musical score, opened nation-wide January 8. Cliff Martinez composed the score, assisted by Tobias Enhus who created the musical atmospheres. Tobias used Kyma and CSound to create every sound in the score by processing struck-metal source material: turbines, metal sheets, steel drums, and even the suspended back end of a fork lift. Starting from these nonharmonic sources, Tobias used the spectrum editor and tuned filter banks to create atmospheres that match the key of the Martinez's musical score. He also used the Kyma timeline to do the surround scoring. The film, premiered at Sundance and picked up by Paramount for wider distribution, is striking audiences in a particularly haunting way, with many reviewers giving special mention to the effectiveness of the sounds and the score. more...

18 Dec 2002 — Oded Streigold recently released a CD that he says is "quite strange music." He calls it Flat. Two songs from the album: Breathing and Untitled use Kyma for generating synthesized sounds based on the pitch and amplitude of a vocal input. The song Breathing is available on the website. more...

06 Dec 2002 — Music tells us who we are and it can change us... To me, the most powerful music moves me to a new understanding, it's something that I could not imagine. —Paul Doornbusch

In his new album Corrosion, released on Joel Chadabe's EMF Media label, Paul creates extraordinary and unusual sounds for instruments, computers, and electronics. In Continuity 3 for percussion and computer, for example, a china cymbal, a circular metal plate, and a tam-tam are transformed electronically into decisive gestures of sound that seem to float in a musical space, or swing through it like powerful birds of sound, or explode spontaneously. In Continuity 2 for recorder quartet and electronics, the sounds of a recorder are translated into thin, floating strands of sound, articulated by sudden movements. Each composition has its own distinct drama. The CD also includes act5 for bassoon and electronics; "g4" electronic sounds; and "strepidus somnus" for voices and electronics. You can order the album from CDEMusic at the web site. more...

18 Sept 2002 — Blanche, a new film by Bernie Bonvoisin, starring Lou Doillon, Gérard Depardieu, José Garcia, Antoine Decaunes, Carole Bouquet, and Jean Rochefort, features some skin-crawling Kyma vocal treatments by Fred Attal (studio DIEZE). Set in the 17th century but with amusingly anachronistic use of slang and references to current global politics, the film opens with shocking scenes of a young girl, Blanche De Perronne, witnessing the savage murder of her parents by Captain KKK, the man in charge of the "Death Squads", a private militia of Cardinal Mazarin. Jump to fifteen years later and a grown up Blanche who is determined to avenge the death of her parents. She discovers two invaluable items that are highly coveted by his Eminence the Cardinal: a substance called "powder of the Devil" and a coded letter that only Bonange, a spy in the employ of Mazarin, is able to decipher. When Blanche finally gets her chance at hand-to-hand combat with Mazarin, Attal uses Kyma to create a chilling, dream-haunting, animalistic scream. In another powerful scene, Mazarin's voice betrays his true nature when, processed through Kyma, it becomes the voice of the devil. more...

09 Sep 2002 — Laminar (Fred Szymanski) is one of the featured remix artists on Iannis Xenakis Persepolis Remixes Edition I. In the spirit of Xenakis, Laminar's contribution, Whorl, contrasts balanced static sections (generated using an analysis/resynthesis of the main body of Persopolis) with powerful dynamic sections, punctuated by deliciously crispy crackly Function Iterative Synthesis. Released under Naut Humon's Asphodel label, the two-disk set includes the original 55 minute work by Xenakis on the first disk followed by the remixes on a second disk. more...

16 Aug 2002 — Claude Letessier created most of the underwater textures for the Universal Pictures movie Blue Crush using what he calls his "old rusty" Capybara-66. (Maybe it got rusty when he was recording on the beach in Maui?) Directed by John Stockwell, the movie examines what happens when a girl surfer enters an all-male surfing competition and falls for a pro quarterback from the mainland. more...

03 Aug 2002 — Sunao Inami has released a new album with Masayuki Akamatsu and Kauya Ishigami called SPL-22001 on the electr-ohm label, featuring the three composers kneeling shrine-like before their laptops on the cover. Living up to its billing as "massive DSP based experimental computer music," the album features about 20 minutes of each composer using Powerbook G4s with MAX/MSP, Kyma, and Reaktor to generate an amazing range of timbres. Inami's work emphasizes delicate, highly resonant filters just on the edge of breaking into oscillation punctuated with silences and crackling, sustained pads with resonant details popping in and out, and shimmering reverberated pads of sustained pitches along with what sounds like a massively granulated train whistle. The sounds are imaginative and varied, sometimes (but not always) with a slow pulsing beat. more...

20 Jul 2002 — Nirto Karsten Fischer used Kyma for processing and synthesis on the new CD he has just completed with Paul Browse.  Visions of Excess | Sensitive Disruption has been released in the U.S. under Tone Casualties.  Kyma can be heard processing the voices of Robert Anton Wilson and Paul Browse and processing raw material for the evolving background pads. Kyma's granular synthesis is audible in the deconstruction of the groove at the end of the track Clockwork Universe. more...

15 Jul 2002 — Doug Masla, creative director of One-O-Eight Music & Sound, has just completed the mastering and soundscape sound design for recording artist Jessie A. Cooper's CD, 9-11-01, a tribute documenting the first four days following September 11, 2001. Masla was given a stereo mix on CD and asked to overdub as many as fourteen stereo channels of sound design and then to interleave it back into a stereo mix. He accomplished this by importing the CD, one track at a time, into his Pro Tools rig where he has Kyma on the first 4 AES I/O busses and an H4000 on channels 5 and 6. Most of the sounds used were chosen by reviewing 8 hours of video from 9/11 and extracting the audio from eyewitness accounts. The remaining sounds came from Masla's library. more...

03 Jul 2002 — Arovane has finished a new album, ve palor featuring lots of Kyma sounds and realtime effects. The release is on the Berlin-based label din. more...

20 Jun 2002 — Soundengine.com has announced the availability of its eleventh WAV file CD-ROM, Joel Putman's Detritus. As Joel explains, "Almost all of the samples on Detritus were found sounds. I recorded them from various sources including the subway, train, taxi cabs, many retail stores (one of which chose to ask me to leave) and of course TV, radio, and the web. Many of the sounds were quite simple to start with such as the sound of a cash register, a turnstile, or a door opening. I recorded most of the source on MD, but also made considerable use of very cheap cassette recorders. The cassette recorders really added to some of the 'lo-fi' character. I then wrote programs in Kyma and Csound to process the samples. Some of the processes I used were—sample granulation, AM, FM, waveset techniques, FFT resynthesis, wavetable tricks, waveshaping, and formant synthesis. The results were files that range from skipping, stuttering sounds to dark mechanistic ambiances." more...

21 May 2002 — David Mooney's 24-part work Rhythmiconic Sections has been released by Arizona University Recordings (AUR). The work was inspired by Leon Theremin's rhythmicon, built in 1931 for Henry Cowell. Selections have been performed at festivals and concerts in the U.S., Belgium and Cuba (ICMC2001 listening room) and have been broadcast in North America and France. The work uses a mixture of synthesized sounds and samples, all of which were created and/or processed entirely within Kyma. The CD can be purchased online at EMF's CDemusic site (search for "mooney&") or directly from AUR. For historical background on the rhythmicon, technical info, and RealAudio samples visit Mooney's web site, http://www.city-net.com/~moko/. more...

16 May 2002 — The graphics and sound designers at LucasFilm are renowned for their creation of complete virtual worlds populated by amusing (and sinister) creatures, and in this latest installment of the Star Wars epoch, they set a new benchmark for computer graphics and sound in film. From a city-covered planet (Manhattan extrapolated with shades of Blade Runner and The Fifth Element), to an opulent water planet, to a Dune-like desert planet, to a clone-makers' planet of endless drenching rain (why didn't they install a space port or something so their visitors didn't have to get soaked every time they walked from the ship to the front door?); from epic battle scenes, to the subtly shape-shifting face of a hired assassin, to chimeric killer animals in gladiatorial combat, to the graceful momentum-modelling gait of the clone masters, you'll find yourself so mesmerized and impressed with the environments that you almost don't care whether there's a story or not. Thankfully, the story flows familiarly straight out of the collective unconscious, a reassuring amalgam of mythic adventure, Lord of the Rings, Dune, and childhood memories of fairy tales (except the queen in this story is elected and has a two year term limit!). There's even a reference to "federation starships" (no, not the Enterprise) and an uncomfortably prescient invocation of emergency war powers by a powerful democratic leader, lending a post 9/11 uneasy reality to the on-screen violence and intrigue. more...

22 Mar 2002 — Sound designers and self-described Kyma addicts Cedric Denooz and Christophe Colson created the voice of the Alchemist for Pitof's digital video film Vidocq. Set in nineteenth century Paris, the film tells the story of the final case of Eugene François Vidocq, fugitive-turned-police-spy with legendary crime-solving abilities. His last assignment was to solve the case of the Alchemist, a monster hidden by a mirror-mask whose victims lose their souls as they are murdered. more...

15 Mar 2002 — Mathis Nitschke used Kyma to process the voice of the "licker monster" as well as for generating ominous backgrounds and ambiences for Paul Anderson's Resident Evil which premiered on March 15th at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. The story revolves around a zombie-inducing virus that is accidentally released from a secret lab called the Hive. more...

13 Feb 2002 — There was a news report a few years ago about a raven in Japan that would perch by a playground every morning and watch the kids play. As soon as the kids would leave to go to school, the raven would fly over and play on the equipment all by himself; they even had a photograph of him going down the slide.

It makes me think that the cover art drawing of a raven dancing with a conductor’s baton on the cover of The Thunderthief is really supposed to be John Paul Jones. Like the raven in Japan, Jones’ approach to his second solo album is intelligent, surprising, playful, and not without a hint of darkness. Biding his time and observing carefully before swooping in for some clever play with an astonishing array of musical instruments, sounds, signal processing, recording techniques, and musical styles as if they were the toys in a children’s playground, he sounds as if he’s genuinely having fun. And the feeling is infectious.

One of the biggest surprises (at least in light of his former protestations) is that the multi-instrumentalist/arranger/composer also sings on this album. Not surprisingly, he uses his voice in a way that is similar to the way he plays his other instruments: directly and unpretentiously, as a tool for conveying the music without distracting attention from it. It’s a voice that sneaks up on you, seemingly quiet and simple but in fact rife with invisible little Velcro hooks that remain in your brain afterwards. more...

29 Jan 2002 — Dan Jones used his Capybara to produce some of the sound track for a film called The Spectre of Hope. The documentary film is about photographer Sebastiao Salgado and is being produced for HBO by actor / producer Tim Robbins. A rough cut of the film was shown at the UN Millennium Summit and was premiered in January at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam.

Jones also used Kyma in the film Shadow of the Vampire, starring John Malkovich and Willem Defoe, although his work was primarily an orchestral score. The film premiered in Telluride in November, 2000. more...

25 Jan 2002 — Claude Letessier was the supervising sound designer on Sony's release The Mothman Prophecies, directed by Samuel Pellington. The film stars Richard Gere as a journalist who investigates reports of psychic visions of mothmen reported by the local in a small town in West Virginia and who suspects they may be the first guard of a larger alien invasion. And just what exactly is a moth man? more...

18 Jan 2002 — In the action film Black Hawk Down directed by Ridley Scott (music by Hans Zimmer), Tobias Enhus used Kyma to do live granulation of a large orchestra, "nervous" sound clusters. more...

05 Jan 2002 — Human Nature is an offbeat comedy from the same people who brought you Being John Malkovich. Francois Blaignan, the Supervising Sound Editor on the film, used Kyma to create an environmental morph between day and night and the procession of the seasons during a surrealistic time-compressed sequence depicting idyllic love. Kyma is also audible in the background ambience during the laboratory scenes and in the zap of the electro-shock collar. Claude Letessier (who used Kyma in The Mothman Prophesies) was the Supervising Sound Designer for the film. Directed by Michel Gondry, the cast of characters includes: a repressed scientist (Tim Robbins) obsessed with teaching table manners to laboratory mice, his lab-assistant with a secret (Miranda Otto), a beautiful girl (Patricia Arquette) with a hormonal problem that causes her body hair to grow to a rich fur-like covering, her electrolysis-confidant (Rosie Perez), and a wild man (Rhys Ifran) discovered living in the forest. Human Nature is a comic/tragic exploration of the thin line between civilized behavior and repression, and the tension between "fitting in" and being true to your own (human) nature. more...

01 Dec 2001 — Randy Bobo at Independent Studios in Milwaukee has been using Kyma to produce original music for TV and radio commercials. For instance, in a new Robert W. Baird (investments, stocks and bonds etc...) radio commercial called "Peace and Serenity," Randy used Kyma to morph from chanting Tibetan monks into a bass line at the beginning of the spot, and then back into monks at the end. In another Baird radio spot entitled "Dogs," he used a variety of Kyma effects to process dog barks, creating a rhythm bed over which real dog barks build into a cacophony of Kyma-manufactured electric k9's. Similarly, in a Dremel TV commercial, he processed power tools through Kyma to achieve a "slightly different" kind of power tool. This spot is currently airing nationwide in the US for the big Christmas "Sellabration." Kyma was also featured in last year's campaign for Norlight Telecommunication's "Techno Jungle" which mangles wild animals with digital sounds resulting in crazy computer creatures. more...

16 Nov 2001 — Matt Haines aka The Rip-Off Artist, releases his seventh album, Pump on Mille Plateaux. The album features a custom Kyma sound developed by Matt. Called the "decrapulator," it uses a looped sample's waveform crossings to trigger samples in a non-random but non-intuitive manner. The output is then edited into lurchy beat fragments and worked into tunes. The result: electronic music that is beat-friendly yet rhythmically subversive. Excerpts from the album and other releases are available at the web site. Also, a track from this album, called Hydrocracking, can be found on the Mille Plateaux compilation Electric Ladyland: ClickHop, Version 1.0. more...

01 Nov 2001 — Agostino Di Scipio's Fragments for Tiresias, a work co-authored with poet Giuliano Mesa, has been included on the CD Music / Text vol.2, Capstone records (CPS8693). The musical part was generated by interacting in the studio with a granular-based "rhythm machine" designed with Kyma, then recursively granulating the rhythmic material. Hidden in the sonic texture is a "sonic quotation" from the percussion parts of Varèse's score, Déserts. The voice of Giuliano Mesa, uttering Tiresias' oracles (predicting disasters that had already happened) is left untouched by the electronics and matched against the rhythmical texture. more...

26 Oct 2001 — Automatic Inscription of Speech Melody is a new CD on the Deep Listening label by Carrier Band (Peer Bode, Pauline Oliveros, Andrew Deutsche and Dick Robinson). Included on the CD is Earth Orbit, a quartet improvisation that Dick Robinson describes as being "the most fun he's ever had performing." Loops and text are drawn from Harald Bode's notebooks and data sets generated by Deutsch more...

14 Oct 2001 — East West Sounds announced two new BT sample libraries: Breakz from the Nu Skool (sample accurate breakbeats, hand-mangled through everything from Kyma to Reason) and Twisted Textures (a two disc collection of time and reality-suspending sounds, pads, and waveforms). In his November 2001 Keyboard interview, BT describes Kyma as "my secret" and goes on to outline how he uses it for evolving spectral resynthesis and granular synthesis pads. He took some of the sounds he did with Kyma for The Fast and the Furious, looped them in Infinity and made playable pads out of them. To make the sample CDs, he "stole" from his own projects, for example, taking a recording he made of someone playing deduk at Gabriel's Real World studio, processing it in SoundHack, passing it through Metasynth, adding some Kyma granular synthesis and looping it in Infinity. more...

12 Oct 2001 — After two years of work, Otto Laske has completed a new composition for loudspeakers called Trilogy. The work (duration of 30:54) comprises three pieces Erwachen (6:29), Echo des Himmels (13:41), and Ganymed (10:34). The pieces derive their title and content from poems by the German poet, Hoelderlin, but use no texts. They are based on scores computed by Koenig's Project One program for algorithmic composition, and are rendered by using Kyma's TextfileInterpreter module. The musical esthetics and technique of Trilogy is discussed in Chapter 6 of Tom Licata's forthcoming book, The Analysis of Electro-Acoustic Music, to appear at the Greenwood Press early next year. Trilogy is dedicated to Otto's German and American teachers. more...

01 Oct 2001 — Metropolis Science Fiction Toolkit II, a sound library of sci fi whooshes and ambiences by Futurity is now available. Futurity's founder, Kyma user Joseph Lawrence, describes the sounds as originating in the real world and manipulated to the point of unrecognizability while still retaining the high bandwidth of the original organic sounds. According to Lawrence, with Kyma you "can create just about any algorithm you can imagine." Sounds from Toolkit I were used in productions ranging from the NBC Nightly News to the exploding cow in the Diablo II computer game. more...

28 Sep 2001 — Sunao Inami's new album, repeater, is now available under the electr-ohm label. Awash in ambient sound design, BPM delay lines, and Waldorf-Wavey beats, astute Kyma users will also be able to pick out the sounds of Kyma's granular synthesis. more...

08 Sep 2001 — Anthony Fedele, sound designer and audio engineer for Concentrix Music & Sound Design is featured in the September 2001 issue of Markee magazine for his work on The Greatest Adventure of My Life, an independent feature film set during the American Civil War. Anthony is sure to set trends in both sound design and fashion now that he's been photographed sporting a Kyma.5 Recombinant Sound T-shirt. more...

13 Aug 2001 — Preston Wright's album, Carpenter Ant Blues was released in November, 2000, and produced by Sonic Circuits 8, innova Recordings. It was performed at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington DC, on August 13, 2001. The concert was produced by the Washington Chapter of the American Composers Forum. more...

19 Jul 2001 — BT's Kyma-processed 'N SYNC track "Pop" is currently the #1 most-requested song in the US. BT produced the new single in which he "irreverently treated ALL their vocals using Kyma for the whole song..." more...

22 Jun 2001 — Composer Brian Transeau (BT) has scored two films, Driven (released April 27 and directed by Renny Harlin) (http://www.what-drives-you.com/), and The Fast and the Furious (released June 22), both of which feature various Kyma treatments and sound manipulations and tons of granular synthesis and monotonizing effects, which BT describes as "similar to vocoding but WAY cooler."

BT says he also plans to use Kyma on his next scoring project: a new Ben Stiller film called Zoolander (released September 28, 2001). more...

15 Jun 2001 — Working under the name MVFS, Danny Zelonky (Low Res / Crank) and Dimitri Fergadis (Phthalocyanine) used Kyma in the production of their Many Very Fine Songs album, coming out June 15th on the Belgian Aim Records imprint.  This “vividly tasteless” collection traces their doomed collaboration from 1995 until its demise in 1999, when the two artists, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, permanently dissolved their partnership.  The music is acrimonious, too, except the tender Aftermarch, which also appears on the new Intermissions compilaton on Plug Research. more...

11 Jun 2001 — Composer Brian Transeau (BT) did a track for Laura Croft: Tomb Raider (starring Angelina Jolie) where he used Kyma to freak the vocal and provide some rhythmic granular stuff which he says "came out AMAZING." more...

20 May 2001 — As technically inspiring as they are humorous, The Tape Gallery's morphing ads are like nothing you've heard before. Check out their new morphing show reel and prepare to be amazed (and amused) by the morphological imagination of Pete Johnston. more...

28 Apr 2001 — During the International Program of Experimental Video at the European Media Arts Festival, Osnabröck, Germany, Fred Szymanski's (recombinant) videoelectroacoustic work, entitled Retentions 1-4, was screened as part of the "Sounds of Vision" program, Saturday night, April 28. more...

25 Apr 2001 — Feeder #8 by Laminar (Fred Szymanski's project) is featured on a new CD of Sound works from the BitStreams exhibition JdK Productions / Creamgarden records. more...

15 Mar 2001 — Matt Haines' fifth album (his first under the Rip-Off Artist name) was released on March 15, 2001. the kids are alright (QS-105) is now available from Sub Rosa/Quatermass [Belgium], and retailers will have it at the beginning of April, 2001. the kids are alright includes Kyma vocoding, analog synth emulation, FM synth weirdness and other spectral manipulation. more...

07 Mar 2001 — Sound design as practiced by Fred Attal (DIEZE studio in Paris) is often closer to music than it is to sound effects. Whether he is letting us hear what it would sound like to be inside a laptop looking out or what the sound of a ticking clock becomes to a psychologically disturbed character as in Mortel Transfert, directed by Jean-Jacques Beinex and released 13 January 2001. Attal's sounds have more to do with the inner mental states of film characters than they do with gun shots and car screeches.

You can hear more of the poetic spectral manipulations he did with Sylvain Lasseur in a film called A Ma Soeur (For My Sister)—the disturbing story of a young girl's loss of virginity as viewed through the eyes of her younger sister—directed by Catherine Breillat and released on 7 March 2001. more...

08 Feb 2001 — Oivind Idso used Kyma to do a remix of a track by Needle on Transmission0014 released on the Beta Bodega (USA) label. Listen to a RealAudio version of his track at http://www.mdos.at/ralink.php3?rid=157. more...

05 Feb 2001 — If you thought you might have hallucinated a Kyma-processed voice when you were up getting a snack during the Super Bowl in January, you were not hearing things (that is, you really were hearing Kyma). François Blaignan used Kyma to do the sounds for a Mountain Dew commercial that premiered during the Super Bowl and is getting heavy air play on US television. So if you happen to see a flattened space ship full of dudes doing Dew careening off arid cliffs like a skateboard on your TV screen, listen carefully for the unmistakably Kyma-tized voice and space ship sounds. more...

22 Jan 2001 — Joel Putman's sample CD Subliminal Message is now available from SoundEngine.com. As SoUnDEnGiNe.com president Scott Peer puts it, "Once again, Joel produces magical incantations over his Kyma System, and delivers a collection of amazing digital effects." Joel describes his CD as "...inspired by music from Skinny Puppy, NIN, Meat Beat Manifesto, and the movie Seven. I really wanted samples that had a harsh industrial quality, definitely not soothing or quiet. I made considerable use of sample granulation to produce textures and noises that have a certain rough and jarring quality. Granulation was used for many of the rhythmic samples as well—note that most of the rhythmic samples can be synced to a multiple of 20 bpm—FM and AM synthesis methods were used extensively to give many of the sounds hard metallic overtones. Some the samples were generated using additive—additive resynthesis methods and all of the samples were processed heavily using fairly standard processes such as reverb, phasing, flanging, and delays. In the end it makes for a collection of odd industrialesque samples." more...

16 Dec 2000 — Dorsey Dunn / Unhearlded Communications/Encountering the Magnetosphere on 3000ce label, recorded live at BACCA1010 on December 16, 2000. more...

13 Dec 2000 — It's not often that you get to hear music that sounds truly different from any you've heard before, and David Mooney's new Larva3 CD presents you with just such an opportunity. Composed using his Kyma-based implementation of the Rhythmicon (Henry Cowell's theory of composition based on the harmonic series), the entire CD is a self-similar structure from the harmonic content of a single timbre, to the rhythmic patterns, and even to the arrangements and durations of each section. But just because it is meticulously structured doesn't mean it isn't also liberally sprinkled with humorous elements! Visit David Mooney's website or go direct to the Rhythmicon. more...

08 Dec 2000 — Mathis Nitschke used Kyma in creating a German radio ad for the film Vertical Limit from Columbia Pictures. Directed by Martin Campbell, the film stars Chris O'Donnel, Scott Glenn, Bill Paxton and Izabella Scorupco. For the ad, Nitschke used Kyma to morph between a voice and ice-cracking, and between a voice and a gamelon gong to give a sense of the coldness, danger, and location of the film, which is set on the famous mountain, K2. more...

05 Dec 2000 — Aliens On Line, recorded at Alien Head Studios and mastered at Capitol Records, is the album from The Away Team. Featuring complex layering, intricate modulations, and lyrics dealing with the role of extraterrestrials in our collective future, the album is also a virtual compendium of what can be done with Kyma's granular synthesis, granular processing, vocoding, additive and pseudo-analog synthesis. NikGreen and Penny Little Savage are veteran musicians as evidenced in their mastery over the wide range of styles heard on the album—everything from radio-friendly synth pop, to abstract musique concrete, to dark orchestral scores that would make suitable soundtracks for the next X-Files movie. The music is intelligent and humorous, too. more...

30 Nov 2000 — Cliff White and Chris Chillier have just released a new album Deovolente: In the Distance (visit the web sitefor a Real Audio taste of what the album is like). The darkly industrial, nine-inch-nailish music-with-a-message has lots of recognizably Kyma bits sprinkled throughout. Notice the morph between tracks 4 and 5, a modulated "sandy guitar" sound on track 5, the electronic wind on track 10, and mysterious outro on track 17, and numerous other smaller Kyma touches. Cliff is already at work on the next album and intimates that it will include even more "Kyma tinkering." more...

15 Oct 2000 — In between playing live drums in his band, and 4 am feedings for his newborn daughter Emma, Bill Rust managed to do all the sound design for the BMG Cannes 2000 Conference video. Rust describes it as "an excellent example of Kyma sound design used to enhance sophisticated CG effects throughout the 2:45 minute spot. I used virtually the whole Sound Library for Doppler FX, Granulations, realtime BPM driven FX, etc." more...

09 Oct 2000 — If you're listening to the radio and happen to notice a fax morphing into a bird, chances are you are hearing the latest Kyma morph done by Pete Johnston at The Tape Gallery in London. Orange, the mobile phone company, has a series of radio ads telling you that you don't actually have to go into the office to get some work done (or is that you can never escape from your office even after you've gone home?) by morphing from the sound of a fax machine to a bird (you can receive faxes on your mobile phone when you are in the park) and the sound of a typewriter into a train (your office goes with you everywhere). more...

14 Sep 2000 — If you wake up to your clock radio in London and think you are having a surrealistic dream, don't be alarmed; you're probably just hearing one of The Tape Gallery's newest radio spots. Pete Johnston created two morphs in the service of "Magnum" ice cream—a brand of ice cream specifically targeted to men. One ad features a sweet-voiced choir boy morphing into a low-voiced Barry White sound-alike. The other features a vacuous lady with a posh accent morphing into a man with a Cockney accent and surplus of attitude (played by none other than Tape Gallery's managing director, Lloyd Billing). The point of the ads? Eating this ice cream will make you more masculine! To complete the irony, actor Steven Fry intones the final slogan "It'll make a man of you." more...

21 Aug 2000 — Sam Wells' experimental/narrative feature film (based on the story of Joan of Arc) called Wired Angel was shown in August 2000 at the Chicago Underground Film Festival. The film features sound design by Fred Szymanski and a score by Joe Renzetti based on sampled Latin liturgical phrases sung by early music singers and children and some rather interesting use of string and percussion samples — all mixed by the filmmaker. Wells describes the work as "operatic." There is no sync dialog but lots of vocal texts, all processed by Fred in Kyma. The film was presented in 16mm but with DTS digital stereo sound, and the filmmaker was present for the showing. more...

08 Jul 2000 — The Crimson Twins (one of whom you may remember as Randy Stack, whose parrot interacts with Kyma through the live microphone) are now on-line with 38 songs in modem-friendly 32 Kbps stereo mp3 format. CT is an experimental group who use a variety of peculiar technologies and alternate MIDI controllers in the creation of their "aural amusements." Included among these aural amusements is Aunt Helen's Bath, a dance piece produced with Kyma. Randy says he was inspired to create the CT mp3 site by another Kyma user. Visit the web site for the all-you-can-eat CT buffet with over 3 hrs of mp3s.

With musical tools ranging from Buchla and Kyma synthesizers to scissors and glue, this band has been exploring curious aural amusements and esoteric electronic instruments since the early 80s. more...

22 Jun 2000 — Doug Masla of One-O-Eight Music & Sound in Venice, California completed all the music for the first season of TV Guide's Celebrity Dish, a new cooking show hosted by morning network TV personality Mark McEwen, and featuring movie and television celebs cooking their favorite food. Each show is 60 minutes long and is shown on the Food Channel Network as well as in international syndication (in over 25 markets so far plus all 50 US states). Doug put Kyma to heavy use in the 82 minutes of music written for the show: lots of granulated snare hits, guitar and synth processing, frequency shifting and general mangling, as well as some sound creation using FM and additive synthesis. According to Doug, "I felt lucky that I was working with an executive producer and director who wanted 'cutting edge' music, not the typical music one would find on a show of this nature, so I had a free hand to let the borders drop!" more...

06 Jun 2000 — Sound designer Bill Rust's guitar/vox vocoding, miscellaneous vocal freeze-framing & time scaling mutations, bizarre re-synthesis of drum loops, Doppler-ized atmospheric extremism, and a slew of other Kyma-generated soundfiles sliced'n'diced in ProTools can be heard livening up nearly every track of BT's new album Movement in Still Life. It was released in Europe first on Pioneer, and then in the US on June 6, 2000 on Nettwerk Records. more...

09 May 2000 — Bill Rust's Kyma madness has infected Sasha's 2 CD set, Live in Ibiza (Studio K7/Global Underground) on the track called Fibonacci Sequence, a collaboration between BT and Sasha. They used Kyma for all sorts of extremely aberrant vox/drum loop/cross-synthesis/processing and as the perfect tool to sonify the text, Mathematics is the Language of Nature. more...

02 May 2000 — Greg Hunter used Kyma to process the audio on one of the tracks on the album Second Wave for his band Alien Soap Opera. Greg is now working on another new album using recordings made of the Himba tribe in Namibia. The Himba are under dire threat due to a proposed dam, which, if it goes ahead, will basically wipe them out, and he is hoping that this album will raise awareness of their situation. When not travelling between Capetown and London or working with his band, Greg relaxes with his new hobby—welding (perhaps because it reminds him of constructing new sounds in Kyma?) more...

01 Apr 2000 — Futurity's new sound library CD, Metropolis Science Fiction Toolkit, was mentioned in editor Ken McGorry's introduction to the POST Magazine Sound Library Directory 2000: "Futurity partner Joseph Lawrence has a knack for imagining what passing space ships and the ambience of dreadful caverns of heavy metal should sound like, and he and partner Jim Verderame serve it up on this new disk meant for the feature films and games markets. Lawrence's favorite box for generating these unearthly sounds is the Capybara•320, along with Kyma software, both from Symbolic Sound." more...

29 Jan 2000 — Thierry De Vries used Kyma to do sound design for a Belgian short film entitled EX.1870-4, directed by Christophe Van Rompaey and produced by Anja Daelemans for Another Dimension of an Idea. No sync sound was recorded for this film, because everything was recorded on virtual sets and blue key backgrounds with heavy background noise. The sound track was built from scratch by the Foley Artist and Sound Editing Department. The characters didn't communicate in a traditional way; dialog happened at an intra-brain level. Voice clicks were morphed in Kyma with dolphin sounds to generate the brain-dialog sounds in this film. The flesh-like elevator floor pass-by's were treated with Kyma-doppler effects. more...

25 Dec 1999 — Marty Frasu used Kyma to design some new "alien-influenced" sounds for David Newman to use in his score for the science fiction comedy Galaxy Quest, starring Sigourney Weaver and Tim Allen. Frasu developed the sounds in Kyma and recorded them as sample files that Newman could then access from his sampler. You can hear the Kyma sounds (not to mention the sounds of a 120-piece symphony orchestra) on the sound track album...or by viewing the DVD (not a bad idea, considering that laughter has been shown to be beneficial to your health). more...

10 Dec 1999 — The Tape Gallery won the ILAA award for Best Sound for their Smirnoff radio advertisement—a Tarrantino-esque experience of continuous morphing and movement through space that qualifies as a mini-film in its own right (even without a single visual image). Lloyd Billing, Simon Capes, and Pete Johnston accepted the award at a black-tie affair in London. Pete Johnston used Kyma to do all of the (startling and humorous) audio morphs for the ad. more...

23 Nov 1999 — Danny Zelonky's Crank album, Heftibag on Mille Plateaux (Germany), features extensive use of Kyma, and expands upon the ideas heard in the recent Wanton Phenomena (Mille Plateaux), and Approximate Love Boat (Plug Research, under artist name Low Res) albums. If you imagine yourself as a jazz musician strung out on ketamine, passed out in an alley behind a sleazy venusian bar, then this just might be your mental soundtrack! Orders accepted at mainstream online retailers like Amazon.com and CDNow. more...

15 Nov 1999 — Describing himself as 'kymatose,' Lance Massey built a new studio in New York's East Village, complete with ProTools MixPlus, MAX/msp, Roland modulars, and of course, Kyma! He had a single released in Germany on BMG called Hello, Ola with a remix by Anastazia. BMG also bought his Overloaded remix.

His first Overload project is now complete. Overload is an experiment in using sound to physically alter the listener's state of consciousness (currently, it's a club thing and requires major sub-woofers). more...

01 Nov 1999 — Interested in training your ear so you can sing and play in just-intonation? Larry Borden's Just Hearing, Volume 1, tutorial eartraining CD is now available from Vanderbilt University. The programming, voice-overs, sound generation, and tuning were all done in Kyma! For more information on the CD series, email Larry and start perfecting your intonation! more...

30 Oct 1999 — Jeff Boydstun was nomimated for an Emmy (his second!) in the Sound Editing category for his work on Roger Corman's The Phantom Eye (AMC). According to Jeff, the Triffid scenes and the monster were done with Kyma! more...

14 Sep 1999 — Humorous, passionate, complex, energetic, eclectic, and uncompromisingy honest, it's one of those CDs best listened to at full volume the first time through. Then be prepared to listen again and again at different levels with different EQ settings, because there's a lot more there than first meets the ear... more...

11 Aug 1999 — A series of BP (British Petroleum) radio advertisements played in the UK in 1999 featuring several Kyma morphs done by Pete Johnston at The Tape Gallery. Each of the ads sonifies how you could win a prize from BP (a hot air balloon ride, record vouchers, a helicopter ride, or a sail boat ride in Turkey) by morphing from car sounds to the sound of the prize. Johnston reports that the hot air balloon was the toughest one to do, because not too many people have been up in a hot air balloon to know what it sounds like. The sailboat was pretty difficult as well, since sailing, like ballooning, is a relatively quiet activity. Helicopters and CD vouchers were relatively easy to represent in sound. more...

10 Jul 1999 — Francois Blaignan, working at Media Ventures, used Kyma to morph between crickets and birds for a television ad directed by Tim "Edward ScissorHands" Burton. Completely computer-generated, the ad is for a product called Hollywood Gum (sold in France) and has an opening scene where day switches to night and back again (hence the crickets and birds). In addition to film work, Francois has been busy doing sound for US television ads for 7UP and Lincoln-Mercury. When asked the flavor of Hollywood gum, Blaignan admitted that he did not know (but he hopes it was not inspired by the La Brea Tar Pits). more...

15 Jun 1999 — Digitale Soundeffekte, an exploration of what can be done with computers and sound (and including an interview with Karsten Fischer and Carla Scaletti by Maximilian Schönherr) was heard on the German radio WDR 5 FM between 4 and 5 pm (and repeated in the evening) on the 15th of June, 1999. more...

13 Jun 1999 — Oliver Lieb has a new album on the Superstition Label in Germany (distributed in the US by K7) entitled L.S.G. Into Deep. Pick up a copy and listen to see if you can identify which sounds were made in Kyma! more...

25 May 1999 — THX, a division of LucasFilm that works to standardize and improve the delivery of sound in movie theatres, will be premiering a new, Dolby Digital-Surround EX version of their audio logo that will be shown just prior to The Phantom Menace (and from then on, prior to every film shown in THX-certified theatres). Marco d'Ambrosio—a composer, sound designer and THX veteran, now in his own company MarcoCo—took elements of the original logo and augmented them with about 20 ProTools tracks of new elements generated using the Kyma Sound Design Workstation. more...

19 May 1999 — Many of the special effects you hear in The Phantom Menace (especially during the pod race and sub scenes) were generated using technology developed by Symbolic Sound Corporation in Champaign Illinois. The Kyma Sound Design Workstation became part of Ben Burtt's arsenal of sound production tools when he first started work on the project. According to the interview in Mix Magazine (June, 1999), Burtt's sound design tools for this project consisted of a Synclavier, a Kyma Sound Design workstation, and an old favorite: 1/4 inch analog tape. more...

14 May 1999 — Sound designer Francois Blaignan has finished work on Endurance, a Disney film based on the story of an Ethiopian runner who won the 10 k race during the Olympic Games in Atlanta. Blaignan used Kyma to process sounds of breathing (and there is a lot of that in a movie about a runner), creating the subtle illusion of voices that the runner hears in his head. Be sure to watch all the way to the end as rumor has it you may recognize the names of some sound designers or sound design workstation manufacturers mentioned in the screen credits. more...

07 Apr 1999 — Heard any radio advertisments for the London Transport recently? If so, then the chances are you were hearing some of Pete Johnston's Kyma-morphing handiwork. Pete and The Tape Gallery have created a series of 13 radio ads encouraging listeners to take the bus by morphing from the sounds of the bus engine, bell, or "hold tight please" into the sounds of exciting locations like the swimming pool, an aerobics class, an open-air market, etc, and including one exquisite 4-part polyphonic morph into the sound track of a romantic movie and a guy sobbing as he watches it ending with the motto, "We make London simple." more...

30 Mar 1999 — Danny Zelonky used Kyma on the first full-length Low Res CD Approximate Love Boat (mistaken alien interpretations of earth music).

Also on Plug Research, in what may have been Kyma's debut in the genre, Low Res and Mannequin Lung team up as Trash Aesthetic to produce fractured hip hop featuring two MC's known as the Shadow Huntz (DJ Screams Medic). more...

17 Mar 1999 — Pieter Volger's CD Licht-Klang-Meditationen 1 is now available. These soundscapes for meditation include mantric expressions that are heavily processed in order to create different sound-energy from only one vocal expression. Nearly all processing, time-stretching, delays and vocoder-effects were done with Kyma. more...

01 Mar 1999 — The Consortium to Distribute Computer Music has announced Volume 22 of the CDCM Computer Music Series, a Salvatore Martirano Retrospective, including L'sGA (better than MTV even if it was done in the 70s), improvisations on the SalMar Construction (the most beautiful, phantasmagorical electronic instrument ever built), Underworld ("...yeah..."), and some of Sal's work using Kyma in live performance (not to mention the ultimately cool portrait of Sal on the cover!) For ordering information, contact cdemusic.org. more...

01 Feb 1999 — "What does the evaporation of water sound like?" This is the kind of sound explored in Laminar's new album Ante-chamber (SOL92CD) on the Soleilmoon label (Portland and Amsterdaam). Described as "acoustic material fed into an aural thrashing machine," this is an entirely new form of music in which second order sonorities are derived from the original material through the use of iterative wavetable distortion. The results, at time surprisingly delicate, at other times explosive, are both unique and beautiful. more...

28 Jan 1999 — Jeff Boydstun at Quantum Productions in LA used Kyma to design the aliens for a television movie called Alien Cargo which aired on the 28th of January 1999 on the UPN network. To create the alien sounds, Jeff says he "morphed pitched pig squeals with some really gross slime and then vocoded for inflection. Weird as hell—the producer loved it!" more...

05 Jan 1999 — UK radio audiences were treated to a spooky little 90-second bit of radio theater in the form of The Tape Gallery's latest project: an ad for Smirnoff vodka. Highly cinematic in character (one could describe it as the 90 second version of Quentin Tarantino's quirkily sinister New Year's '96 release, Four Rooms), the ad traces the steps of Tom, the hotel bartender, as he carries a bottle of Smirnoff's and some clinking glasses to a party upstairs. In keeping with Smirnoff's television and print ads, everyone and everything he passes along the way is transformed through the prism of the Smirnoff bottle into something entirely different (and not a little sinister): the tinkling of the higher keys on the cocktail piano turns to raindrops while the bass notes turn into ominous thunder; the sweet-voiced hotel desk receptionist morphs into psycho Norman Bates; two women engaged in catty gossip actually turn into real cats; and the party upstairs evolves into a kind of seance in which the party-goers chant to summon the spirit of long-dead Tom Harvey (who turns out to be none other than the wandering bartender himself). It's the kind of thing calculated to leave audiences wondering what was that? (and, not coincidentally, make them eager to hear it again and puzzle it out with their friends). more...

01 Sep 1998 — Francois Blaignan's ad for Blockbuster Video (done at Media Ventures) was rated as the #2 ad in the entire USA the summer of 1998 by Shoot magazine (a trade journal for advertising agencies). So if you happen to see a television ad based on old scary movies, listen closely for Kyma on the sound track! more...

28 Aug 1998 — Film composer Stephen Taylor used Kyma to do some granulation for the score of Why Do Fools Fall in Love. The life story of Frankie Lymon as told through the flashbacks of the three women he married (simultaneously as it turns out) features lots of production numbers, the Platters, and an appearance by Little Richard as himself. Despite the fact that it is the story of a musician who rose to fame when he was just 12 years old and died by age 25 of heroin addiction, Stephen assures me that it is a comedy (he has seen it with 5 different test audiences and all of them laughed all the way through it), so go see it or rent it on video, especially for the sound track! (and for a little history on how the early rock and roll musicians were exploited by the record companies). more...

15 May 1998 — St. Louis based composer and sound designer Mike Radentz used Kyma on the music for Fortune Entertainment's Motor Sports Weekly, a half hour TV news magazine on racing that debuted on the Fox Sports Midwest network last summer. Radentz used the morphing capabilities of Kyma "to create a kind of guitar dive bomb, air ratchet, engine rev, pig squeal, car by, woman screaming kind of thing for the main theme and then used that effect throughout the package." He also used Kyma "to do some tempo based Doppler effects and distortion waveshaping of sound effects." more...

05 May 1998 — Brian Belet and Mickey Helms have music on the CDCM COMPUTER MUSIC SERIES VOLUME 26 / Centaur Records, CRC 2404 /Music from CREAM: Center for Research in Electro-Acoustic Music. And Phil Winsor is featured on CDCM COMPUTER MUSIC SERIES VOLUME 27 / CENTAUR RECORDS CRC 2047 / Music from CEMI: Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia. more...

23 Apr 1998 — Brian Belet goes wild with Kyma-warped samples of trombone virtuoso Scott Mousseau playing nothing but his mute in "[MUTE]ation" on Music from CREAM: Center for Research in Electro-Acoustic Music, CDCM, Vol. 26 Centaur (CRC 2404). more...

05 Apr 1998 — Bill Rust and Chris Iannuzzi used Kyma to create endlessly falling Shepard tones and vocoding for the promos of the Tom Hanks HBO special From the Earth to the Moon, so if you are "cable-ready" you may have unknowingly heard Kyma on TV. more...

03 Mar 1998 — François Blaignan and Claude Letessier from Media Ventures used Kyma's vocoder and RE Sounds on the trailer for the upcoming Lost in Space from New Line Cinema (shown in many theaters as a coming attraction before Spawn). more...

23 Jan 1998 — Edmund Eagan used Kyma for the sound track of a broadcast project with video director Chris Mullington. Called Beyond Belief, this video art program aired on the CBC program "Man Alive." Beyond Belief explores one person's spiritual quest from childhood Catholicism into atheistic tendencies fueled by notables from Darwin to Dr. Persinger. Kyma supplied sampling, resonance and vocoder manipulations. There's even a cameo of Ed himself in a First Communion procession! more...

12 Dec 1997 — Pete Johnston, technical manager at Lloyd Billing's Tape Gallery studio in London, used Kyma's additive synthesis tools to make a more easily understandable robotic voice for a television spot enumerating all the reasons you might prefer to take the Chunnel rather than flying from London to Paris (perhaps the most convincing of which is, "Fact: The train looks really cool").

Johnston, Billing, and audio engineer Simon Cepes also completed a series of UK radio spots for Walker's Crisps, each of which was based on the theme of various characters morphing into British football hero Gary Linekar in order to steal potato chips (crisps) from little kids.

Johnston also used Kyma to morph from the sounds of an office and various other workplaces into clinking glasses and reggae music in a series of ads for _Malibu_—a sweet alcoholic drink that can apparently turn the hum-drum workaday world into one big party. more...

14 Sep 1997 — Lawrence Fritts has the first track Minute Variations on the American Composers Forum CDSonic Circuits. Each year the American Composers Forum curates a program of electro-acoustic music by composers around the world. more...

15 Jul 1997 — Bill Rust used Kyma to process his own voice saying "Trick or Treat" (in an inimitably demonic way, of course) for a talking Halloween mask he developed for Pragmatic Designs (now Digi-Frame Inc.) in New York. more...

07 Jun 1997 — Mike Radentz, sound designer at Technisonic Studios in St. Louis, used Kyma's vocoder in a commercial for Six Flags, and he used the RE tool to cross a human voice and steam whistle in a pilot for an animated children's program. more...

10 May 1997 — Francois Blaignan was a sound effects editor for the light comedy film Just Write, the story of a Hollywood tour bus driver posing as a screenwriter to romance an up-and-coming young actress. As their relationship grows, so must the bus driver's charade to keep the actress from discovering he is a Beverly Hills tour guide and not a hot-shot writer. Blaignan accentuated the "outsider" effect by using the sounds of breathing, and he used Kyma to warp ordinary night sounds like crickets to give a feeling of uneasiness and tension to some of the scenes. more...

17 Apr 1997 — Sound designer and programmer American McGee of id Software used Kyma to generate many of the ambient sounds and backgrounds, and some of the alien weapons for Quake II, a game descended from the famous Doom. more...

12 Mar 1997 — Sound designer Lance Massey used Kyma on the sound track for a national ad compaign for Nabisco's Oreo Cookies with blue filling. He describes the two Kyma sounds he designed as follows: "The main sound took a drum loop as its input. An amplitude follower was then attached and used to drive the pass frequency of a high pass filter, which of course was filtering the drum loop. It's a subtle, but very useful effect, kind of gave the loop just a little added crunch. The second sound wasn't nearly as important in the mix, but is a lot more interesting from a design perspective. To create a unique 'swooping' effect, I sampled the vocal group singing a unison descending line. I used the output of the frequency tracker to drive the formant frequencies of the two formant element (multiplied by 3 and 5 to try and isolate those harmonics). I recorded that to disk, chopped off the end, then used the time/frequency scaler to stretch the final result to the appropriate length." more...

22 Nov 1996 — During the opening scene of Star Trek: First Contact, movie-goers can hear some of François Blaignan's voice-processing work on the sound track. Each time Picard (Patrick Stewart) makes mental contact with the Borg throughout the film, you can hear some subtle whisperings that were constructed by processing the Borg queen's voice through Kyma. Some of the heavy breathing you hear in the space-walking scenes is also due to François, but he did those sounds with his own lungs, sans Kyma. Blaignan also makes heavy use of Kyma to produce sound effects for The Muppets Dr. Seuss on Nickelodeon. more...

21 May 1996 — John Dunn and Mary Anne Clark used Kyma to help realize an entire CD of music "based" (no pun intended) on DNA sequences! Featured proteins include beta-globin sequences from human, whale, bat and echidna, the protein in spider's silk, lysozyme C from human, echidna, mouse and green monkey, and collagen. Ranging in style from a quasi-renaissance motet with a woman's voice chanting the names of amino acids, to a complex imaginary landscape based on Collagen, this well-engineered CD can be heard in Real Audio on the web or purchased as a one-off CD-R signed by the two composers. more...

17 Apr 1996 — If you turn on your radio in London these days, you are likely to hear a spot describing how, if you spend more than three pounds and buy a certain kind of chocolate (no purchase necessary sic) at an Esso Snack & Shop, you could end up winning a shopping spree in New York. Sounds pretty ordinary so far. But as you listen, you begin to notice that the announcer is gradually morphing from a British guy into a New Yorker (and, by the way, that the birds chirping in the background are being transformed into police sirens). Whatever else this ad might tell us about British perceptions of New York, it is just one of several examples of the amazing audio morphing work being done by Pete Johnston, technical manager and Kyma guru at The Tape Gallery, a London studio specializing in sound design for advertising. more...

05 Feb 1996 — Collaborations is a double CD from Frog Peak featuring several cuts that were created using Kyma. To produce this CD in honor of poet Chris Mann, Larry Polansky, Music Dept. Darmouth, put samples of Mann reading his own poetry up at an FTP site and invited composers to create a short piece using Mann's voice as the only source material. Kyma-warped examples that made it onto the CD include:

Dennis Miller's 5 Frog Pieces Brian Belet's difference (no doubt it queues) and an abstract (difference (queues)) Mickey Helms' Technicolor, Galactic Bar, and Phantom Paul Rosas' Depth Perception Bob Pearson's Adaptive Parasites Paul Luevano's sitarbirds Doug Michael's Radio Sky Part II

For more information, contact Frog Peak more...

04 Aug 1995 — Whether he is granularly disintegrating in a virtual Japanese restaurant, shouting at Denzel Washington in a high speed car chase, or just relaxing in three pieces in a pool of blue nano-blood, the voice of SID 6.7 in the Paramount Pictures film Virtuosity is also the voice of Kyma. more...

11 Jun 1995 — Maki Fujii used Kyma to provide some unique sounds for Soft Ballet's album, Form. A high-energy mix of synthetic sounds, guitars, drums and pop-style vocals, Form covers a range of styles from Ken Morioka's upbeat dance music to Maki Fujii's dark, stream-of-consciousness musique concrete pieces. Fujii's U swings moodily from a random-walking analog synth bass to distorted fed-back screaming punk, to abrupt silence, to heavily reverberated brooding electronic organ--bipolar love? No One Lives on Mars —featuring a jazz guitar solo and an interesting doubling of the sung parts by a soft female speaking voice—is a sad and lonely rap on being the only living things in the solar system, and Jail of Freedom has a British industrial sound with distorted or phasing narration alternating with singing and sequenced rhythm tracks. On the CD single Fujii's Eye (as the twin to Morioka's You) is a deeply layered musique concrete piece with live bass, noise, synthesized sounds (granular synthesis?), and heavily processed samples. And the cover art brings back memories of SIGGRAPH93—the year they figured out how to make waterfalls. Mixed by Dillon Gallagher and Maki Fujii, the album and an accompanying CD single were recorded under the Victor Entertainment (JVC) label, and Soft Ballet did a thirteen-city tour of Japan to promote the album. For more information and a complete list of tour dates and locations, browse the news on Maki Fujii's home page and Soft Ballet's home page. more...

17 Apr 1995 — Composer, pianist, and erstwhile movie star Bruno Liberda has a CD out under the Signum label (of MusiContact in Heidelberg), entitled 100 Ansichten vom Berge Fuji 1.buch/11 featuring Christina Ascher, mezzosoprano, and Bruno Liberda, live electronics. In English, the title would be 100 Views of Mount Fuji, and if a mountain had a voice, it would sound like this music: low, creaking, unfolding at geological time scales, reverberating with the ghostly voices of all the humans who ever lived and died in its shadow. Notated graphically on opaque paper with transparent and translucent overlays, the score allows for several possible interpretations including live performances and studio recordings like the one on this CD. more...

03 Dec 1994 — Maki Fujii's group Schaft (Maki Fujii, Hisashi Imai, and Raymond Watts) have released an industrial-techno album called Switchblade with a companion remix album called Switch, both under the Victor Entertainment label (J.V.C.). Switchblade is highly varied and imaginative, ranging from the vampiric trance-eroticism of Olive to a darkly humorous rap mocking the glories of the InfoBahn called Information. Switch Remix includes remixes by Dillon Gallagher, Logic Freaks, Reload, and Meat Beat Manifesto, and even lets you remix the cover art (by rearranging images printed on mylar). more...

07 Oct 1994 — Kyma is featured in two pieces on Frank Tveor Nordensten's album yonder, produced by audio attic productions. Despite what the liner notes identify as Nordensten's "ambivalent relationship with electroacoustic music," the completely electronic try to enjoy the daylight and the antonymously-named boring for percussion and tape combine perfectionist production values with surprising, original, highly-spatialized sounds and a dramatic narrative structure. more...

15 Jun 1994 — Composer/Keyboardist Nick Peck used Kyma to produce "Prelude," the first track of his album Islands in the Stream. If you were to ignore the high-quality, digital audio production values, you would swear that "Prelude" came straight out of one of the classical electronic music studios of the 1950s, even down to the accompanying graphic score. Delightfully raucous layers of granulated noise bands, bursts of random-frequency wavelet blips, a low C minor third played with a nice buzzy waveform (or is it processed piano?), backwards-envelope bells, bursts of crowd noise, and an overall formal structure based on gestures or sound objects rather than notes characterize this first track, described as "opening the door to Riverworld." Peck is not afraid to use silence or short, stacatto gestures, giving the piece a fresh, original sound. more...

Publications

11 Nov 2010 — Kyma was identified in the November 11 2010 issue of the Montréal newspaper L'Actualité as one of 35 inventions that are going to change our lives. The associated web content for the article focuses on the concept of live control, featuring a video of Kyma controlled by the Nintendo Wiimote (via Osculator). According to L'Actualité correspondent Véronique Robert, "Kyma fans adore this type of complex computer that can create new sounds as well as reproducing a complete orchestra. For a composer, it's like playing God"(!) more...

20 Jul 2009 — Kyma/Pacarana is reviewed in the July 2009 issue of Future Music. A few of the more memorable quotes include:

...everything Kyma-X can do will make your brain explode in a very messy but not necessarily unpleasant kind of a way.

...it's not so much a soft synth, more of an audio construction kit, like Reaktor or SynthEdit, but on a shop full of steroids.

...You don't just get total control over audio, you get a brain-expanding education in how to think about sound.

...it's a few hundred steps beyond what's possible with a synth construction kit.

...Kyma has the unique ability to morph sounds, melting them into each other like plastic. This is completely different to the usual crossfade effect, because pitch, timbre and rhythm all change simultaneously. more...

15 Jul 2009 — Richard Wentk reviews Kyma running on the Pacarana in the May 2009 issue of Audio Media, concluding that working with Kyma makes you realize just "how unadventurous most of your experience with audio has been." Richard notes that "most audio engineering and sound design happen within a small creative space, and Kyma blows that space wide open." more...

10 Jul 2008 — An article on alternative music controllers published in the July 10, 2008 online version of the New York Times includes videos of Edmund Eagan and Carla Scaletti using the Continuum Fingerboard to control Kyma. more...

01 Jun 2008 — On pages 11-14 of the June 2008 of the SEAMUS newsletter, Camille Troillard discusses the past, present, and future directions of his OSCulator software. more...

01 Nov 2007 — Christiaan Gelauff is featured in the November 2007 of Interface Magazine in an interview with Allard Krijger exploring his CAG microsounds for Kyma. The interview, which left the interviewer "deeply impressed by the stuff Christiaan designs on this system," also includes a CD with audio and video demos. "Christiaan loads a few files in Kyma and explains how he created the filters and what the problems are in designing the filters. Mainly it is about advanced mathematics...Then he plays the result and I am astonished by the beautiful sound of the filters he has created." more...

13 Oct 2007 — Sound and The City was an innovative sound art project, conceived by the British Council and realised across China between 2005-2006. Seven leading UK sound artists—Brian Eno, David Toop, Peter Cusack, Clive Bell, Scanner, Kaffe Matthews and Robert Jarvis—were invited to create new work inspired by the civic sound environments that they found in four cities—Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, and Guangzhou. The artists’ experiences are documented in this book, along with essay contributions from UK and Chinese critics.

The project also invited the Chinese general public to describe their favourite sounds of the cities that they live in. Those descriptions, along with audio recordings, are contained within the book and accompanying CDs. Many of those favourite sounds are ambient ones, less and less frequently heard as Chinese society changes at its current ferocious pace.

200 page book (English and Chinese) + 2 audio CDs, Edited by Yan Jun and Louise Gray. Published by Horizon Media in Beijing, China.

"Sound And The City might be termed an intimate art project. It speaks to the general public, not the selected public, instead of being proudly ahead of it’s time, it intervenes in the lives of the contemporary Chinese public; it encourages people to feel and share, rather than criticize or display miracles. The seven UK artists who made projects for Sound And The City have composed sounds in the most environmentally friendly ways. They invite us to listen again to our own cities and our lives. We have made this book because we want to share and listen with more people." – Yan Jun more...

02 Apr 2007 — Joel Chadabe was recently honored with the 2007 SEAMUS Award in recognition of his pioneering work in interactive composition and instrument design, his book Electric Sound, his advocacy for electronic music through the Electronic Music Foundation, and his work on raising awareness of environmental issues through sound art. Composer Kurt Stallmann interviewed Chadabe for the April issue of the SEAMUS newsletter where the two of them discuss models for new musical instruments, ranging from simple triggers to complex interactive systems: "These models suggest a fundamental questioning of what it means to compose and realize computer music. He [Chadabe] makes a clear distinction between the rendering model and the interactive model. The 'rendering' model uses technology to create an idealized performance of the composer's structured ideas. The interactive method defines a system of instrument behaviors associated with varied input from performers whereby the process of mutual engagement through performance forms the work. In line with systems developed to support this way of composing, he mentioned the visionary developers of the Kyma/Capybara system (Scaletti and Hebel) where real-time, open-ended responsiveness to live input was an initial design goal of this integrated digital system extending back to the late 1980's." more...

09 March 2007 — Matematica e Cultura 2007, published by Springer and edited by Michele Emmer, includes two chapters on mathematics and music written by Kyma users: Simple mapping e la dimensione estetica by Brian Evans (which addresses the connection between music, graphics, and number), and La metafora nella matematica e nel suono by Carla Scaletti (which equates the act of mathematical discovery with that of musical composition). Other topics in the book include infinity, architecture, soap bubbles, graphic novels, mathematicians and autism, front-back symmetry in pre-Incan Peruvian weaving, and many others. An English version of the text is to be published in October 2007. The Italian version can be ordered online from Springer (or from Amazon). more...

01 Apr 2007 — Issue co-ordinator, Tony Myatt, is seeking articles on the work of Autechre, Taylor Deupree, Mark Fell, and others for a special issue of Organised Sound, titled "New aesthetics and practice in experimental electronic music." more...

01 Feb 2007 — In the February 2007 issue of Future Music, Doug Kraul answers the question "Why is everyone so keen on Kyma?" (see page 102 of the magazine). A couple of excerpts from his extended response: "In my experience there isn't one product that provides the same facilities and workflow that Kyma delivers," and "Kyma is especially agile at analysing a sound and then letting you resynthesize it in ways that afford you a broad palette for making creative changes while you're performing, including 'morphing' one sound to another." Pick up a copy of FM at your local booksellers or newsstand to read his discussion of the advantages of using a dedicated sound computation engine. more...

31 Dec 2006 — Richard Lainhart is featured in an interview by Tokafi, the online classical and experimental music magazine. The interview focuses on Richard's ongoing collaboration with his friend (and next door neighbor) Jordan Rudess. more...

03 Oct 2006 — Naut Humon's new Recombinant Media Labs (RML) facility is featured in the October issue of MIX magazine. Created as a bridge between cultural, commercial, and educational worlds, RML features a traditional recording studio, a video editing suite, a modular analog and software synthesizer chamber, and a large flexible black box theater with 16.8.2 surround sound, a 10-screen high definition video system capable of projecting panoramas of up to 360 degrees, and 32 transducers in the floor for that ultimate infra-bass experience. Reflecting Naut's long-standing interest in spatial audio, Recombinant Labs employs a hybrid of several techniques for sound spatialization, including vector-based panning, Ambisonics, and wavefield synthesis using clusters of speakers to pixelate a localized sonic 'image'. A fully-loaded Kyma system is on hand for artists in residence interested in doing customized synthesis, processing and spatializing. Naut's dreams for the facility include collaboration, creation and education: "We fully welcome any organization or individual interested in the prospect of a creative collaboration." Check out the RML website and consider making a proposal to Naut at Recombinant Media Labs. more...

01 Oct 2006 — Computer Music Journal, Fall 2006, includes an announcement of Lippold Haken's Continuum Fingerboard including a mention of the fact that it can communicate with Kyma over FireWire. more...

01 Sep 2006 — Check out the final page (152) of the September 2006 issue of MIX magazine to read Dennis Miller's tips and tricks for getting the most out of your Kyma sound design workstation. In keeping with the sound-for-picture focus of the issue, Miller covers topics like synthesizing water drops, metalizing, cross filtering, and Doppler-shifting live to picture. A favorite quote: "Kyma's Tau Editor is so much fun it should be illegal." more...

04 Jan 2006 — The Winter 2005 issue of Computer Music Journal is dedicated to Visual Music, and features several Kyma users including articles by Brian Evans and Joran Rudi, a still from Dennis Miller's Cross Contours on the front cover, and excerpts from Agostino Di Scipio's Pulse Code (on Wood), and James Hegarty's Aerial on the enclosed disc. more...

01 Jan 2006 — Matteo Milani reviewed Kyma and interviewed Carla Scaletti for the January 2006 issue of Strumenti Musicali magazine. In a sidebar, he also describes Recombinant Art 01, a 5.0 surround DVD of artists using Kyma that was produced by Edmund Eagan.

Milani writes that he appreciates the relationship that Symbolic Sound has established with its customers, the familiar climate of the company, and collaboration with the customers in programming the software as the characteristics that distinguish this brand from others in the sound design market. He describes Kyma as a purchase that will repay you immediately but even more importantly, over time as terms of the tens of plug-ins you will not have to buy in the future. more...

01 Nov 2005 — Brian Marley reviews the Timet/Mariposa CD Metamorfosi di canzoni napoletane I Dischi Forma, 2004 in the November 2005 of The Wire. Metamorfosi, edited and composed in early 2003, was one of the first works that Lorenzo Brusci produced with Kyma. more...

20 Sep 2005 — Composer Agostino Di Scipio is interviewed in the Fall 2005 issue of Computer Music Journal. Interviewer Christine Anderson focuses on Di Scipio's recent work in which he creates sonic interactions between a source, real-time digital signal processing in Kyma, and the acoustics of the room hosting the performance in order to create a dynamic, self-organizing system, symbiotically connected with the surrounding environment. Di Scipio's work takes into account not just sound-source and the sound-receiver, but the space in between.

In answer to one of the questions, Di Scipio states: I should mention that, in composing these pieces, I started working with the Kyma sound-design language and its number-crunching engine consisting of several Motorola processors. I enjoyed working with it so much, it then became for me a rather stable computer music platform with which to work. more...

13 Sep 2005 — The September issue of Ville Giardini magazine includes a page dedicated to Lorenzo Brusci's Giardino Sonoro La Limonaia dell'Imperialino. On archphoto.it you can be transported to the hills of Florence and experience the sonic garden by way of a video and an interview with Brusci discussing the integration of music and nature, the creation of sound and light objects, the navigation between chaos, order and causality, and the concept of a garden as a venue for the public presentation of music. more...

12 Sep 2005 — A limited number of copies of Paul Doornbusch's book on the music generated by Australia's first computer (CSIRAC) are now available from Common Ground Publishers and also from Amazon.

The Music of CSIRAC charts the history of computer music starting in Australia in the early 1950's, bringing to life the inventive spirit and imagination of the engineers and programmers who decided to make music with a computer. The book includes a CD so you can hear a reconstruction of the original sounds. more...

11 Sep 2005 — Find out how Howard Moscovitz, founder of http://www.electro-music.com, participated in the development of the first DSP at Bell Labs in this online interview. more...

06 May 2005 — Not only has Roland Karnatz performed live with Kyma, he has also taken the time to reflect on the process and summarize some of his observations and discoveries. In Interactive Computer Music: A Performer's Guide to Issues Surrounding Kyma with Live Clarinet Input (available as a free PDF download), Karnatz describes some of his discoveries, including his observations on audience perception of interaction and the differences between using an acoustic instrument as a controller or as a source of sound. Karnatz believes that technology is blurring the distinction between composer and performer, and he wants to encourage more performers to compose interactive environments for themselves. Thus, his document is written from the player's point of view and contains descriptions of various models of interaction between Kyma and a live performer. He also includes practical information on issues such as speakers and amplifiers, performance-space acoustics and diffusion options, interactive inputs, and microphone choices for clarinet. There's even an audio excerpt demonstrating his "prepared clarinet" concept. Karnatz' philosophy is summed up in his quoting of Jacques Attali who predicts a time when the "bulk of commodity production then shifts to the production of tools allowing people to create the conditions for taking pleasure in the act of composing." more...

15 Apr 2005 — Paul Sop has created a one page photographic overview article on Kyma at his website where he writes, "The Kyma/Capybara combination is a 'whole is bigger than the sum of its parts' kind of ultimate electronic musical instrument and sound design tool." And if you visit his blog right away, you can still catch the photograph of a bullet going through a banana in the April 5 entry. more...

08 Apr 2005 — Composer Scott Miller is mentioned in an article from the Grand Forks Herald newspaper in connection with his participation in the Third Festival of Women in the Arts at the University of North Dakota. Composer-in-residence Michael Wittgraf, who also uses Kyma, describes it as "very freaky sounding and very exciting." more...

14 Mar 2005 — Ever wonder how all that sound and music you've been making is altering your neural nets? The researchers at the Music and Neuroimaging Laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess & Harvard Medical School write: The human brain has the remarkable ability to adapt in response to changes in the environment over the course of a lifetime. Yes, it's true, music really does make parts of your brain grow larger (though it is not clear whether this enlargement might be at the expense of other areas of the brain)! more...

02 Mar 2005 — Scott Miller's Shape Shifting is reviewed in the Minneapolis St. Paul City Pages. The article describes how Miller used his "space-age sound-bending machine" Kyma as a magic wand that "disables the discerning listener from matching sounds to the instruments they came from—and that's precisely what Zeitgeist finds so alluring." more...

01 Jan 2005 — The January 2005 issue of Sound Maker magazine features an article on Kyma X by Andreas Monopolis. A free CD included with the magazine features audio samples from Kyma and a "music video" summarizing the November 2004 seminar organized by Andreas Mniestris at Ionian University. The video opens with a moving shot travelling down a stone path and over the moat into an old castle where the music department is housed and includes several action shots of seminar presenters Carla Scaletti and Kurt Hebel demonstrating Kyma X.1, seminar participants using the Continuum Fingerboard (http://www.hakenaudio.com), and Scaletti using a bifurcation diagram overlay on the Wacom tablet interface controlling Kyma (http://www.symbolicsound.com/cgi-bin/bin/view/Company/KymaX1Released). more...

23 Oct 2004 — Ora disponibile anche in versione italiana l'imperdibile intervista a Carla... more...

08 Oct 2004 — The Graphicalsound web site is hosting an exclusive interview with the creator of the Kyma language, Carla Scaletti. She and sound designer Matteo Milani look behind the sounds and discuss the history and future directions of Kyma. You can download the pdf files at http://www.graphicalsound.com/Journal.html. more...

01 Oct 2004 — Check the October 2004 issue of Electronic Musician for a review of Kyma X. Reviewer Dennis Miller writes: Kyma X is a perfect example of how hardware-accelerated tools can still beat software by a wide margin. There is no software or bundle of soft tools that can come close to the power, expandability, and flexibility that Kyma offers. more...

05 Aug 2004 — Skip Sorelle of Team Sound and Vision in Washington, DC was interviewed for an article titled "Sound Design - New Frontiers Forged with New Tools" in the August issue of icom: Film & Video Production & Postproduction Magazine. Sorelle is quoted as saying that "Kyma's browser-based drag and drop environment invites experimentation." more...

01 Aug 2004 — Ferdinando Arno's beautiful Milan-based studio Quiet Please! is featured on page 14 of the August 2004 edition of Pro Sound News-Europe. Described as "the ultimate in retro sci-fi chic, as well as some cool kit," Arno's studio is the source for sounds and music for 40% of all Italian television commercials on the air. Arno enlisted studio designer Andy Munro to deal with some of the acoustic isolation challenges posed by the studio's underground location and to advise on the acoustic properties of Arno's materials of choice: wood, glass, plastic, and vinyl. The result is a clean minimalist look that suggest the orbiting space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey or Number 2's interrogation room in The Prisoner. Or, as Munro describes it, "a deliberate tribute to the over-the-top sensibility of some 60's and 70's iconography." When it comes to gear, Kyma user Arno's philosophy is simple: "...we only have what we need and make sure it's both top-quality and practical." more...

24 Jul 2004 — Listeners to BBC Radio Four's 'Open Country' heard some Kyma-produced sounds when sound artist Robert Jarvis was interviewed in July about his installation and educational based work that encourages people to listen afresh to the sounds around them. More information on the program is at the web site where you, too, can listen afresh by clicking the Listen Again link. more...

20 Jun 2004 — For an in-depth Kyma review by composer/sound designer/author Scot Solida, check out pages 54-59 of Future Music magazine (the June edition). The verdict? This hardware-meets-software audio construction kit is, quite simply, the Holy Grail of sound design. Comprehensive and balanced, the review makes it clear that Kyma is not for everyone, but instead is intended for those intrepid few that feel that innate urge to get inside of sound itself. Speaking of his own experience, he writes: I find that Kyma has infiltrated my daily thought processes in an almost disturbing fashion. It's even become a bit of a pastime to dream up new processes and bizarre ideas with which to challenge the system. And to my continued astonishment, Kyma always seems to meet those challenges, no matter how outlandish. more...

19 Jun 2004 — Vincent Stefanelli, Kemal Amarasingham, and SimonAmarasingham, co-founders of dsonic (http://www.dsonic.com), were recently interviewed in the Digital Media Developer newsletter. Stefanelli describes games as the leading edge for both music composition and sound design and, when asked about what gear they use, he responds, "We have an arsenal of hardware and software tools, but our favorites are Gigastudio, Logic Audio and Kyma, the latter being an especially great sound design tool." more...

18 Jun 2004 — There seems to be a watery theme to the May/June issue of Sound Editors Guild Magazine which features a photo of MPSE Best Sound Editing award-winner HamiltonSterling (Master and Commander) on page 30 and, starting on page 27, an in-depth interview with Finding Nemo sound designer Gary Rydstrom. more...

25 May 2004 — Pro Audio Asia (the May-June 2004 issue) has some beautiful shots of collaborators Yasuski (playing various instruments live through Kyma) and dancer Yuhoh (rhymes with UFO) in their multimedia performance of Genji Monogatari at the Alti Buyoh Festival in Kyoto (See pages 6-7). more...

20 May 2004 — Producer/composer/performer and "Sonic Surgeon" BT is interviewed by Mike Levine in the May 2004 issue of Electronic Musician, discussing the "almost surgical precision" of the cutting and time-correction work Transeau performed on the Emotional Technology album. The subject of Kyma also comes up in the interview:  "My main sound-design box is Kyma, the Capybara system ...Every instrument you build in Kyma is unique unto itself...It's the wormhole. It's the sort of door you open, and on the other side are infinite possibilities in sound." more...

15 May 2004 — Yasuski's Tale of Genji is featured in a story by Tim Goodyer in the May issue of Pro Audio Asia magazine. Tale of Genji is a work for solo dancer and solo musician, a multimedia performance employing Japanese traditional dance, electric guitar, kora, and Yasuski's audioHologram—a Kyma-controlled five-channel surround panning and processing system where the speakers literally surround both the audience and the performers. Yasuski took the musician's role accompanied by dancer Yuhoh, (pronounced 'UFO', a name she adopted after seeing a UFO near her house) supported by a troupe of traditional Jiutama dancers.  The Tale of Genji is based on the ancient Japanese tale Genji Monogatari—a novel written in the 11th Century by Murasaki Shikibu of the Heian royal court. more...

01 Dec 2003 — The December 2003 issue of Organised Sound is dedicated to the topic of live computer music performance. Articles by two composers using Kyma in live performance are featured in the journal: Agostino Di Scipio and Brian Belet.

In Live performance interaction for humans and machines in the early twenty-first century, Belet observes that the dualistic way in which computers have been portrayed in films and literature ("time-saving miracles" vs "diabolical threats") pervades the application of computers in music as well. Belet champions the creation of "genuine interactive performance environments" which achieve "equal balances between human performer and machine" and in which sound and structure are inseparable.

Di Scipio's Sound is the interface: from interactive to ecosystemic signal processing is a manifesto for a new paradigm for computer/human control systems: one in which the audio signal in a performance space controls the parameters of its own production. In Di Scipio compositions (as in biological ecosystems) large-scale structure evolves as an emergent property of simple rules for local interaction, feedback, and excitation by noise. Di Scipio composes the local rules; the evolution of the composition depends upon the live performer, the performance space, and ambient noise present in each unique performance. more...

26 Nov 2003 — Our act of "listening" has the ability to extract patterns, assigning them, in real time, to several different time-scales... We claim that this hierarchical storage, in turn, affects our ability to correctly synchronize events in a sound stream... (The processing of the audio-samples was done on a Kyma-Capybara system in the Dept. of Mathematics, Universitá Roma Tre.) more...

17 Oct 2003 — I just got the e-mail letting me know that my Kyma X upgrade is in the mail!! Looks like now is a really bad time to have a full time job :)... more...

01 Aug 2003 — His new album, Emotional Technology, is the latest milestone in his sonic trek and electronic innovation. It's a huge leap forward for me, says BT. I've grown as an artist, a vocalist and a producer, which is all reflected in the new album. Not only did I sing on six tracks, I also experimented more with traditional and aleatoric/contemporary string writing, and break-step beats, and learned more about coding for proprietary sound-design systems such as Kyma. more...

01 Sep 2002 — ...Kyma 5.0 is an exceptional piece of software... more...

01 Sep 2002 — A programmable sound processor can be used to compute sounds (rather than playing back stored ones). This requires a powerful computer or Digital Signal Processing (DSP) system. The Symbolic Sound Kyma/Capybara system consists of Kyma software, which allows one to visually design algorithms for computing wave- forms, and the Capybara hardware, which consists of multiple DSP chips computing in parallel for a display featuring a multitude of complex sounds in real time... more...

05 Jun 2002 — One of Chadabe's more recent electronic music tools of choice combines Kyma (Greek for "wave") software running on a desktop computer with a proprietary audio-processing system called Capybara (named after a Patagonian, aquatic guinea pig). In a 2001 performance at Engine 27 in New York of what Chadabe dubbed his 'audiomagic interactive environment', several solo musicians took turns interacting with sounds that were triggered by Kyma and generated by Capybara more...

01 May 2001 — The Kyma System is a real engineering feat, and its designers are to be commended for the ongoing and significant enhancements they have provided during the past ten years. The system is remarkably stable — I can't recall a single system crash in the many years I've used it — and when its price is compared with that of even a moderately loaded hardware sampler, it looks like a real bargain. more...

01 Mar 2001 — Now in its fifth generation, the Kyma system is a massively powerful "black box"... more...

28 Oct 1998 — We will power-up our Kyma system, and we will challenge future scene of live signal processing ! more...

01 Oct 1997 — My motivation in writing Kyma was originally one of necessity — I couldn't find any other system that did what I wanted, so I was compelled to make the system myself; but I discovered along the way that designing a composition language was itself a kind of composition. At times it becomes difficult to distinguish when I am working on a composition and when I am working on the idea of composition as embodied in Kyma... more...

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1995-2003 Archives