These are two sounds that use the new TAU player, designed to be used with the Continuum Fingerboard. They may work quite well with other MIDI input devices, although I haven't tested them. Both of these sounds have audio demos that are part of the TAU anouncement by Symbolic Sound.
KALIMBA
Newer Kalimba sound samples are at the Haken Audio web site in the examples section. I've also attached both here. The first:
In this audio example I'm taking advantage of a cool new feature on the Continuum, that allows one to create portamento slide between two fingers without reattacking the note. One can set a range for that portamento effect. I've got it set to three semitones, so the portamento will be ignored for larger intervals. In this example you can hear wholetone mordents desecending in the melody taking advantage of this feature.
The second example (much longer, circa 8 minutes) also was created with only this Tau Kalimba sound. This is a finished piece and gives a better idea of some of the tonal ranges possible with the Tau Kalimba:
The Kalimba Kyma sound is based on two original Kalimba samples, both the same pitch, one softer/duller and the other brighter/louder. It sounds quite nice to me. It has some of the nasty bite that occurs when a Kalimba is stuck hard. It amazing to me how far that single pitch can be stretched in the TAU player and still sound great. Having the formant shift (which is labelled Tone in the sound) makes for a nice variance in Kalimba timbres. The original Kalimba that was sampled was a Latin Percussion model, quite gentrified compared to the authentic African varieties.
TROMBONE
The Trombone Kyma sound is based on the TAU trombone from Symbolic Sound. I've added in a graphical envelope to control the playback point through the TAU Timeindex. Using the graphical envelope allowed me to create a loop back and forth area, so that the trombones have a nice fairly non repetitive sustain loop. A VCF is used with !Keyvelocity control to simulate timbre changes. I included a second trombone TAU sound that has output meters that appear as circular controls on the VCS. They also output MIDI Ch16 controllers 7 and 8. I use that MIDI info to drive faders that appear on my Lemur controller. It works quite well, although I'd appreciate it if someone could look at my meter structures and make suggestions on how to best construct them so I get meaningful data from them. I'm not sure about the math so I could use some help.
For both sounds I found I was getting Out of Realtime messages so I backed off on the MIDI voice count. I had a Kalimba / Meter combo but I scratched that because it seemed that the two would go out of Realtime with heavy and even moderate simultaneous note processing.
Comments and suggestions for design improvements always appreciated!
-- EdmundEagan - 24 Feb 2006
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Great! the sound of the kalimba are incredible!
-- JesusGestoso - 27 Feb 2006
