Kyma Sightings

...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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.