Symbolic Sound Kyma: Community ConcertVideoClips

The City Gallery . Leicester, UK . 16 October 2002

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The following excerpts are from a October 16 2002 concert at The City Gallery in Leicester produced by Garth Paine. All the sounds you hear are being generated live by Kyma and the performers you see on screen. The sounds you hear are a combination of live processing of the acoustic instruments captured through microphones and synthetic and sampled sounds generated in Kyma. No external mixers, processors, or synthesizers were used -- just Kyma. In some scenes you can see the blue LEDs on the fronts of the Capybaras (positioned off to the left side). (The City Gallery is an art gallery, and the drapery behind the performers is actually a painting of drapery.)

TangledTimelines (3.7 MB): Kyma does live spectral analysis and modified resynthesis of a cross-strung harp (along with noise feeding into tuned vocoders controlled by the inverse of the harp's amplitude envelope). At the end of the clip, a harp harmonic is captured and granulated.

Many Times John (4.6 MB): by Joel Chadabe. Each piece in this series is named for the performer (in this instance, John Richards on double bass), who reacts and interacts with the live processing--a large network of harmonic resonators whose parameters are controlled by random number generators. (Not sure why the camera-operator panned over to Kurt Hebel and Brian Belet, but as you can see, they did not have much to do. They started the pieces on alternate laptops and then stood by in case the volume needed any emergency adjustments. The processing is controlled by the performer's audio signal.)

Lament (4.3 MB): Live voice processing through delays, granulation, pitch shifting, auto-tuning, and harmonic resonators. You can also hear a CloudBank resynthesis of a trombone used as a drone. (Text by Alice Thorner, used with permission).

Sirens (8.8 MB): by Robert Jarvis. The trombone undergoes chordal granulation, Shepard-toning, various feedback loops, and lots of panning--giving the listener a sense of being in a small boat in the middle of a vast expanse of ocean.

Lyra (3.7 MB): by Brian Belet. Performed by Justin Jones, violinist with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London. Kyma captures the live violin sound, modifies it, and plays it back at various times throughout the piece.

Natura allo Specchio (4.4 MB): by Agostino Di Scipio. Performed by percussionists Alonso Mendoza and Jason Huxtable. Polyphonic transformations of the percussion sounds explore the side-effects of real-time granulation, driven by the percussionists' own performance over a background texture of iterated nonlinear synthesis.

Many Times Continuum (8.3 MB): Carla Scaletti playing a realization of Joel Chadabe's Many Times... on Haken Audio Continuum Fingerboard. The Continuum is controlling a Kyma FilterBank with noise input feeding into a bank of HarmonicResonators with randomized parameters.