Games and Sound Libraries Using Kyma

Some of the evil sounds designed by Mathis B. Nitschke (http://audionomio.de/) for the film Resident Evil are to be included on a new 7 CD set available from Hollywood Edge (release date: March 3, 2003). 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. For details check out http://www.hollywoodedge.com.

Peter Comley and Tawm Perkowski used Kyma for the sound design on the new XBox game, MechAssault (http://www.xbox.com/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. Outrageous zaps, drones, and sub-bass sounds were integrated with the more traditional sound design and Foley elements to create some intense, cutting-edge audio effects that don't lose their impact even after being heard thousands of times. Filtering, pitch enveloping, granulation and waveshaping/distortion were key elements of the Kyma sounds which were used in processing field recordings and generating textures. Nearly every sound utilizes a carefully crafted low frequency element generated by Kyma to fill out the bottom end of explosions, building collapses and weapon-firing sounds. The game has been getting great reviews for the sound effects (e.g. from XBox Addict's Gamer Reviews: "This is mastered in Dolby 5.1 and it sounds like your right in the middle of the action. I use my surround system and it kicks freakin !&%$@#* like no tomorrow.")

Larry Fritts will be presenting a paper at SEAMUS on the Iowa Musical Instrument Samples (MIS) database, now featuring 15 orchestral instruments recorded in an anechoic chamber as mono 16-bit AIFF files. These samples are freely available online at: http://theremin.music.uiowa.edu.

RobAcid (http://www.warehouse-club.de/Biographien/RobAcid.htm) is using Kyma to process and morph drum samples for an upcoming Native Instruments sample CD. The name of the CD is ELECTRONIC DRUMS, and his section is called the RobAcid-DrumKits.

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." For more information, visit http://www.soundengine.com.

East West Sounds (http://www.soundsonline.com) announces 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 & 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 Fast and 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.

Metropolis Science Fiction Toolkit II, a sound library of sci fi whooshes and ambiences by Futurity is now available. http://www.futurityfx.com. 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.

Joel Putman's sample CD Subliminal Message is now available from SoundEngine.com (http://www.soundengine.com/html/press.html). 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."

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 (http://www.postmagazine.com): "Futurity (http://www.futurityfx.com) 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."

Big Fish Audio released a sample-CD collection called Things That Go Bump In The Night, a collection of "the oddest, most outrageous and befuddling" sounds for use in filmscores, electronic music, and wherever else weird and wacky sounds arerequired. The 2-CD set was produced, compiled, edited and mastered by Matt Haines and features contributions from not one but THREE Kyma users: Danny Zelonky, Atom Heart and Matt Haines, as well as some other (non-Kyma enhanced) producers. Three of the sound designers are said to have been committed shortly after the CD was released. Be forewarned; there are no "normal" sounds anywhere on these disks!

Atom Heart's sample CD, *atomizer™ (atom heart's world of digital drums)*, is now available from Big Fish Audio. For info, check out http://www.bigfishaudio.com. Atom Heart's remix of the title *tel. bell* by *markus schmickler* will be released on the German label, *mille plateaux*.

Randy Yount, Director of the Multimedia Division of Clatter and Din in Seattle, used Kyma to create the voice of Hecatomb, a bad guy composed of cannibalized body parts who hasn't slept for 20 years (no wonder he is so cranky), in Sierra On-Line's CD-ROM Phantasmagoria-II: A Puzzle of Flesh. Featuring everything you could want on a CD-ROM, including S&M, violence, murder, and partial nudity in a town very much like Seattle, Phantas-II is essentially an interactive feature film on eight CD-ROMs. Yount also used Kyma to create the voice of MAXX, a satellite-with-an-attitude, in a Bill Nye the Science Guy CD-ROM.

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. For the latest information, visit www.idsoftware.com.

Partners Francois Blaignan and Mike Mancini are busy with freelance sound design projects in the LA area. They have just finished doing the sound for a John Brasher film called Persons Unknown staring Joe Montegna and Kelly Lynch and have started on a new virtual reality movie for ShowTime called Meno's Mind. On the multimedia front, they have completed a CD-ROM game for Interplay called The Mummy and are in the midst of doing the CD-ROM version of Waterworld. In addition to all of this, they somehow manage to squeeze in the time to do the sound for the Hypernauts TV show along with other freelance work for EFX studios.

L2 (that's "L squared") Sound Effects announced a 10-CD set of sounds from Frank Serafine's library. Categorized as Animals, Electricity and Static, Industrial, Metal, Science Fiction, Supernatural, Transportation, and Water, this set has everything from Tesla's original Jacob's Ladder, to an angry bee in a jar, to the sound of pigs mating (too bad they couldn't include a track with Serafine giving the story behind each of these recordings). Call L2 Communications at 1-800-779-L2FX and ask for information on Platinum Sounds for the 21st Century.