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Films where you can hear Kyma

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...