Search

Community

Newsletter
Photos & Videos
Share
Learn

Bringing you the news from the Kyma community since 1990

Kyma Studio/Live Performance of the Month

• Click here to view previous studio and live performance photos

Kero

DJ Kero (digitized) in his Windsor Studio overlooking the skyline of Detroit.

Brought up on the underground sounds of Detroit and inspired by complex sequencing and unusual soundscapes, Kero's tastes tend to the experimental. Also known for his sensor-activated media installations and print design, Kero has performed live all over Germany and Canada as well as being a regular fixture of the Detroit/Windsor underground. Here he's controlling Kyma with his Lemur. Photo courtesy of Melissa Rae

New Releases

30 Aug 2010 — Delora Software has added three new products to their ever-expanding line of Kyma control surface and connectivity applications. vKi and vKi lite bring remote MotorMix emulation to your iPhone or iPod touch, and vKiP turns your iPad into a stunningly beautiful, full-featured wireless multi-touch MotorMix emulator. vKi, vKi lite and vKiP use Kyma's integrated Open Sound Control (OSC) features for direct WiFi communication with a Pacarana or Paca sound computation engine. No additional software is needed, making it usable with both OSX and Windows workstations!

For more details, please visit http://www.delora.com. vKi ($9.95), vKi lite (free) and vKiP ($39.95) are available on the App Store on iTunes. more...

29 Aug 2010 — Jean-Edouard Miclot has created a new blog on sound design, and the first two entries give a detailed, step-by-step look at how he created some amazing sounds in Kyma. The sounds (which you can audition right on the site)—crisp, warm, powerful, human, and sometimes humorous—seem to be inspired by and paying homage to the masters at Pixar and LucasFilm. It's fascinating, fun (and educational too!). more...

25 Aug 2010 — Miguel Gil and Enrico Bárbaro, dressed all in white and seated on a giant chess board, use both a Paca and a Capybara-320 controlled by Wacom tablet and MotorMix (and a few controllers and sound sources you have probably never seen before) in their fantastic new split-screen video giving new meaning to the phrase "Playing sounds"! more...

05 Aug 2010 — Scot Solida has been using TouchOSC and OSCulator on the iPad to control his Kyma/Capybara system, using a Kyma Sound he created to manipulate, chop, remix and reorder loops. He used four loops from a song he finished recently and used the TouchOSC panel to jam with it in real-time. The loops included a snippet of his voice from the chorus, a bit of guitar, a Univox drum box processed in TurboSynth, and an analog modular. Here are the results: http://www.theelectronicgarden.com/Scot/AnotherSubtleCrack.mp3 more...

21 Jul 2010 — Whaddup? for saxophone and electroacoustic music, was written by Mark Phillips specifically for very young saxophonists. It was composed at the request of Nicolas Prost, to whom the piece is dedicated. The entire accompaniment was created in Kyma using two sound sources: 1. an odd, limited assortment of samples (key clicks, key slaps, breath sounds, a clanking mouthpiece cover, a multiphonic and one fast run) recorded by Greg Sigman on a vintage 1927 Conn bass saxophone with a very noisy key action. 2. a recording of Cânes Nicolas speaking in French about traveling from his native Haiti to study music in the US and his anticipation of the 2010 World Cup. more...

08 Jul 2010 — DJ Kero, who cannot help but be inspired by the view of the Detroit skyline from his Windsor studio, has been invited to join the cast of Cunei Media. You can hear his Deep Space Events Kyma patch here. Listen to his Detroit Underground podcast on iTunes. more...

06 Jul 2010 — vKA joins vM2 and PacaMidi as the newest member of Harmony Systems' Delora Software products for enhancing and expanding your control over Kyma. vKA transforms the Akai APC40 hardware controller into a Kyma Virtual Control Surface with sixteen physical rotary controls and numerous lighted push button switches. vKA retains the APC40's tight integration with Ableton Live so that you can seamlessly alternate between "Ableton Live mode" and "Kyma VCS mode". more...

04 Jul 2010 — Ex Ovo, "Music For Minimal Matters," will be releasing Richard Lainhart's first collection of music for the label later this year. In the meantime, though, Ex Ovo has produced a special limited-edition release to coincide with his performance at Avantgarde Festival Schiphorst. The Schiphorst edition contains two tracks from the up-coming release, along with two other exclusive tracks, never heard before. Frans de Waard of Vital Weekly has this to say about it: "Lainhart is a master of drone music from the end of modern classical music. Playing a Steinway grand piano with nine e-bows, or the Kyma System on the electric guitar... Lainhart works extensively with the overtones generated by these 'simple' actions..." The new release contains two guitar/Kyma tracks: "A Bell Above The Clouds" and "Threshold." more...

24 Jun 2010 — Check under the Help menu in Kyma for a link to the latest Kyma update. A few highlights since the last eighth nerve include: —OSC (Open Sound Control) support on the Paca and Pacarana, —Support for the PreSonus FireStudio Project, TC Impact Twin & MOTU Ultra Lite Hybrid mk3 —Virtual Control Surfaces (VCS) now open 11 times faster (this includes switching between Layouts on an already-open VCS) — MultiSample and MultiFileDiskPlayer can AutoLabel the Index parameter with the names of the files Along with several new CapyTalk messages, Prototype Sounds, improvements to Tau frequency/time shifting and more! (Please see the full list of update improvements on the tweaky site). more...

15 Jun 2010 — Can a sound function as a symbol? What is your earliest sonic memory? Can sound convey meaning? These and other questions are being debating now on Peter Rantasa's new Philosophy of Sound Forum. more...

12 Jun 2010 — Agostino Di Scipio discusses his compositions with Federico Placidi and Matteo Milani (aka Unidentified Sound Object) in this video and written interview. more...

11 Jun 2010 — You can hear an example of Christian Schloesser's 'Kyma Virtual Analog Drum Synthesizer" here. Bounce, Spin, Reverse are part of the instrument(s) themselves (for example, each of the 8 outputs has three MemoryWriters with global retriggers for bouncing). All Sounds and "manipulators" are mapped to MIDI keys so they can be played in real time. No samples were used in this example. It is all synthesized, waveshaped and compressed using Kyma/Pacarana, then recorded via ADAT into Digital Performer 7 with no overdub, no EQ, no compressor and no FX, exported and converted to mp3 using the L.A.M.E. encoder. more...

01 Jun 2010 — music videoclip, using paca and capybara. more...

07 Mar 2010 — Software developer by day and music enthusiast by night, Bar None uses Kyma with MANTA, Eigenharp, analog synths, Monomes and anything else that generates or controls sound! (Did we mention he loves OSC?) more...

02 Feb 2010 — Did you know that you can check for free Kyma software updates any time you like by selecting Check for updates... from the Help menu in Kyma? Make sure you are benefiting from all the latest features and improvements. Read more...

28 Jan 2010 — To copy the full path name of a file in order to paste it somewhere else: In the Sound Browser, locate and select the file. In the small info window at the bottom of the Sound Browser, use Ctrl+L to make the window large. Select and copy the full path name (or any other information about the file). Now you're ready to paste! more...

25 Jan 2010 — Sascha Dikiciyan has just released the soundtrack for the Raven Faction in the Sony game called MAG (the Massive Action Game on the PS3); he used Kyma to treat the theme remix. Read the interview at gameinformer and download the music from iTunes. more...

24 Jan 2010 — Helen Bellringer used Kyma to create the sounds for the Blockee iPod/iPhone game as part of her internship at Radium and is about to begin her fourth year of studies in Creative Music Technology at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama: more...

08 Jan 2010 — Richard Devine utilized Kyma processing on his track for Music for Our Future, a compilation of music inspired by the world of SyFy's Caprica, curated by XLR8R, Pitchfork and Create Digital Music. Processing sound sources ranging from water and leaves to giant turkeys and pigs' breathing, Devine layered spectral analysis, morphing, granular processing, and FM synthesis to create a "roller-coaster ride of audio frequency dynamics." For more details and photos, see Create Digital Music site. Devine also mentions his Kyma set up in his video with Electronic Musician (EM). more...

05 Jan 2010 — Prism Audio's well-regarded Orpheus audio converter is now working with the Paca(rana). For a full list of supported audio converters, please visit: http://www.symbolicsound.com/Learn/SupportedConverters more...

14 Dec 2009 — Paul Doornbusch has created a fascinating chronology of computer music placing musical and technological developments in computer music along side contemporaneous technological breakthroughs in other fields. more...

31 Sep 2009 — In Migration, HamiltonSterling and Jimmy Haslip take us on a journey that begins in Senegal and ends up on another planet. Using Kyma timbre-scapes and live performances on bass and percussion, Haslip and Sterling create an immersive soundtrack tracing humankind's restless and inevitable journey out of Africa and outward to the stars. Inevitable in part due to what Huntington Ellsworth calls human kind's "innate migratory tendency" and partly due to "Nature's stern urgency" (COP15?). The best listening is in surround-sound with the lights dimmed: Side 1 (white band) of the DVD is a 5.1 Dolby Digital version and a 2 channel PCM 24-bit 48 kHz version. Side 2 (red band) is a 5.1 24 bit 48 kHz DVD-Audio 5.1 version; this is definitely a 'hi fi', 'audiophile' type experience. It's a soundtrack that creates its own visuals inside your head. Listen to a preview and order your own copy from Helikon Sound , CDBaby, or Amazon. more...

29 Aug 2009 — In August, 2009, Symbolic Sound expanded the real-time sound-computing power of the Paca(rana) sound engine by making it possible for Kyma sound designers to chain two or more multiprocessor Paca(rana)s together via the built-in A/B Expansion ports. To the Kyma software, a network of Paca(rana)s appears as a single sound computation engine with multiple processors. Kyma automatically detects the number of available processors and schedules the execution of DSP-intensive signal processing and synthesis algorithms across multiple processors. more...

21 Aug - Sept 7 2009 — Composer Edmund Eagan was commissioned to do the sound track for "E", a large scale video projection conceived and directed by Alain Couture for the 2009 Canadian National Exhibition. Each night of the CNE (August 21st to September 7th, 2009), the exterior of the southeast entrance to the Direct Energy Centre was transformed into a giant canvas onto which fantastic building-sized images were projected. The animation was created using 3D software rendered against a 3D model of the actual building. The result was amazing optical illusions, creating the impression that the interior of the building was on fire, or that the building had transformed itself into a huge aquarium, a Mayan temple, or a Gothic cathedral, or that faces were extruding out from the stone and smiling down at the people below. The sound track, rich Kyma-based sound generation controlled by the Haken Continuum, Space Navigator, and Wiimote, was delivered through a quadraphonic sound reinforcement system.

E Promo 1 gives a sped up synopsis of some of the images from the original 30 minute presentation. The soundtrack for this excerpt is a section of the E score featuring a Continuum Fingerboard performance of a Mellotron flute sound designed and realized in Kyma. You might almost believe entire thing is a video animation until you notice people opening the doors and leaving the building. In this hilarious excerpt, Eagan turns the Direct Energy Center into a giant game of Pong, complete with an ersatz Kraftwerk parody sound track (featuring Edmund's voice processed through Kyma). All buildings should look and sound like this whenever the sun goes down! more...

01 Aug 2009 — Espresso lovers might enjoy savoring the dark brown bittersweet liqueur even more when it's sipped from demitasse cups decorated with dancing Pacaranas. Click here and scroll down below the T-shirts. 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...

28 Jul 2009 — Doug Kraul's vM2 (as in "virtual MotorMix") is a Mac OSX application that provides a way of using a suitable alternative hardware controller with applications that require a MotorMix. vM2 includes a JazzMutant Lemur project template so that a Lemur multitouch hardware controller can be used as a substitute for the MotorMix in Kyma. more...

20 Jul 2009 — The latest version of (Kyma X.67) includes a resizable clock, improvements to Tau, plus numerous miscellaneous improvements. There is now support for the Mackie Onyx 1220 Mixer with optional FireWire I/O card to be used as an audio interface for the Paca(rana), and there is a new tutorial video on the Timeline. more...

10 Jul 2009 — Rob Rayle has released his Outersect Modeler for Kyma on the Capybara: a set of microcoded Sounds that allow the user to emulate the expressive characteristics and modes of acoustic instruments by manipulating a small number of simple parameters that relate directly to the actions of real-world players. Many of these sounds are "realistic" and others behave the way natural instruments behave and are expressive in many of the same ways that acoustic instruments are expressive. For demos and purchasing information, please see the Outersect website. more...

15 Jun 2009 — Check out Photonal's music-generated videos on his website. Photonal (aka composer Andrew Purdy) uses Kyma, Logic, and Quartz Composer to map various musical elements such as a kick drum, vocal or pad sweep, to graphic parameters such as dimension, color or rotation in XYZ space to dynamically create image sequences. more...

09 Jun 2009 — Composer Sascha Dikiciyan is interviewed in Fangoria about his score for [PROTOTYPE], the new Activision game based in a post-viral-infected New York City. Balancing the orchestral and cinematic with dark ambient electronics, Sascha and composing-partner Cris Velasco create a darkly brooding and frightening world. In the interview, Sascha describes how he used Kyma to create an intense feeling of tension using low frequency, almost naseau-inducing humming sound clouds for New Order and other themes throughout the game. more...

01 July 2009 — Ambrose Field's Being Dufay, released worldwide this month on ECM/Universal and mixed in analog at Oslo's Rainbow Studio, features Kyma throughout. Field took fragments of music by the 15th century composer, sung by tenor John Potter, and placed them in new digitally modified settings. Kyma was used to create a flexible, digital model of Potter's voice. Using Tau synthesis, Field was able to morph Potter into female backing singers and a haze of new medieval choirs. Being Dufay received 5 star ratings for both music and production in the June edition of BBC Music Magazine, with allaboutjazz.com dubbing it "one of the most hauntingly beautiful records of the year" and concluding: "...this is music created by the heart as much as the mind." Read the full review at BBC Music Magazine.

A schedule of live peformances of Being Dufay can be found here. more...

26 May 2009 — Mike Johnson completed the audio post production for the cinematics for the new PS3 exclusive game InFAMOUS for Sucker Punch. Kyma emerged as the main processor for creating all of the electrical sound effects for the main character, Cole McGrath. Johnson explains that there aren't a lot of CD libraries with great sounding electrical effects to draw from, so one has to create and/or record their own custom sounds. For InFAMOUS he recorded Styrofoam rubs, squeaks, and scrapes that he then pitched, reordered, and granulated with Kyma to create a whole new palette of custom electrical sound effects. more...

24 Apr 2009 — JOMO (aka Luddy Harrison and Pan Luoyi) have released their first album under the Dong Music International label, celebrating the release with a live show at Star Live in Beijing on April 24, 2009. Instrumental sounds on the album were created using a Virus TI for the bulk of the ordinary electronic sounds, Kyma for special or difficult sounds, and a V-Synth for fills. Pan Luoyi's airy-yet-precise vocals are in English (she plans to release the same songs in Mandarin at a later date) blending with Luddy's lush, densely layered, calmly-paced instrumental parts, peppered with intriguing sound-effects.   Break Your Heart could be the theme song for a film noir remake of a Bond film. You can hear excerpts from the new album at the Dong Music's website.

JOMO is available on Amazon China with an international release planned soon (watch the Jomo website for updates). While you're there, be sure to check out Luddy's blog on his experiences as a new immigrant to China. more...

27 Mar 2009 — Agostino Di Scipio's STANZE PRIVATE ecosystemic sound construction is part of an exhibition entitled Anlage Towards a Musical Protorealism which opened on 27 March 2009 at the Galerie Mario Mazzoli in Berlin. These works of sound art were chosen as exemplars of a new protorealism movement; the works "do not represent life, they create life, and then give it to us very directly, each dragging us into a sonic environment that forces us to reinterpret our own perception of reality." 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...

12 Jan 2009 — Have you ever wished for a smaller, more powerful sound computation engine for Kyma? The Paca and Pacarana are 2-5 times faster than the Capybara*320 and about 1/6th the size. For more details visit: http://www.symbolicsound.com/Products/Pacarana more...

09 Jan 2009 — Composed while lucidly dreaming and realized using a Tenori-on controlling Kyma, AC's latest album, One, was influenced both by his studies with Karlheinz Stockhausen and his experiences DJ-ing. Described as "pure ambient bliss," the album bathes the listener in gentle binaural landscapes. AC describes Kyma as "the perfect tool for the imagination."  One is available from 666 ZipCode Town Rekkids. more...

30 Jul 2008 — SlipStick generates a wide variety of audio and control signals — ranging from creaking-door sound effects to expressive keyboard-controlled additive oscillator instruments that explode into shards of temple bells as they decay. SlipStick can also create a rich filter-excitation signal or a planet-smashing live audio distortion effect. Kyma X.54 and the new SlipStick modules are free to registered Kyma X owners. 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...

01 Jul 2008 — Kyma is detectable on several tracks off the new album, Lucibel Crater: The Family Album (Searching Eye Records), reviewed in the July 2008 issue of Buzzbin magazine and available on iTunes or at Lucibel's website. Threadbare Funeral (with guest artist Lou Reed on guitar), features Kyma-synthesized tabla-esque drums and metal-bars, and a monkish vocal that was synthesized from a glottal-pulse. You can also hear the effects of Kyma's stereo plate reverb and the input-output compressor. more...

20 Jun 2008 — A video performance of Carla Scaletti's SlipStick (for Continuum fingerboard and Kyma) is viewable at her website. All sounds for this piece are generated by an algorithm modelling a mass at the end of a spring dragged across a surface with friction, resulting in a range of sounds from creaks to squeaks to pure sine wave oscillations.

A binaural mix-down of Cyclonic, a new 6-channel Kyma-generated composition commissioned in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Experimental Music Studios at the University of Illinois, can be heard at the website. more...

09 Jun 2008 — Re-experience the idea of the 'Schubert song cycle' and 'pop music' through the subtle and sophisticated filter of composer/organist Wolfgang Mitterer's musical imagination in two new releases from col legno. In Im Sturm, a baritone song cycle is delicately punctuated with electronic chittering and pianistic jabs that evolve into entropically decaying clock chimes. Although billed the exceptionally gifted organist, composer and specialist in electronics Wolfgang Mitterer's...first foray into pop: Sopop is not pop music, but rather Mitterer's experience of and reflections on pop music: English lyrics, action-verb titles, beats, and a universe where anything and everything is sampled and re-imagined. more...

02 Jun 2008 — Culture-theorist and Kyma artist Steven Brown has posted a video of some of his experiments controlling Kyma and various analog synthesizers using the Tenori-on. Brown, who conceives of music visually, says that he feels at home with Tenori-on's synaesthetic approach to music-making. The Tenori-on has MIDI I/O and can either generate its own MIDI clock or sync with an external one. The controllers are still rare enough that Brown has not had an opportunity to try pairing his Tenori-on with another one, but once he does, be prepared for some emergent sound and light structures emanating from Eugene! more...

13 May 2008 — Producer Rich Costey described Kyma as "unbelievably deep" in an interview he did last year with EQ Magazine. Discussing a track called Supermassive Black Hole from the recent Muse album Black Holes and Revelations, Costey wrote: "...I processed a whole bunch of samples through a Kyma system which I have, which is basically just an open architecture sound designer box and you can build whatever you want. It's unbelievably deep - it's like a black hole of sound design. It's similar in context to Reactor, but I think it's much deeper and it sounds incredible. A lot of the drums on that track were processed by a Kyma. The sounds that are jumping out, and the fills and stuff, that's all processed by the Kyma." 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...

20 Apr 2008 — USO (Unidentified Sound Object) is featured in Transition—Turbulence, a project of New Radio and Performing Arts. Turbulence is dedicated to commissioning, exhibiting, and archiving new and emerging hybrid networked art forms. Check out the USO feature here or the above link. more...

17 Apr 2008 — Cristian Vogel's Double Deux / Delicado is now available on Last.FM. Known for his work on experimental techno labels such as Tresor, Novamute and Mille Plateaux, Vogel's music has more recently been electrifying a different kind of dance floor. When Franz Treichler (Young Gods) introduced Cristian to Swiss choreographer Gilles Jobin it was, as they describe it, "love at first sight". Since then Cristian has scored the music for four of Jobin's creations including Double Deux (2006) and Delicado (2004). more...

14 Apr 2008 — Taylor Deupree used Kyma to do the processing on NYC/Tokyo artist Sawako's CD Hum. In Hum, Sawako starts with sounds of everyday life, processes them, and works them into melodies and arrangements employing piano, voice, roomtones, field recordings, and DSP processing by Deupree. more...

31 Mar 2008 — Sound (and experience) designer Lorenzo Brusci has set up a new network of professionals dedicated to the idea of conceiving and re-designing human habitats through environmental interaction design, sound composition and site specific acoustics research. Their goal is to enhance urban life and public/private architecture, with an eye (and ear) toward improving the human experience. For example, they are doing work on masking and transfiguring the noise inherent in city environments. For more information on their goals and activities, visit http://www.soundexperiencedesign.com more...

10 Jan 2008 — Camille Troillard has released a new version of OSCulator at http://www.osculator.net. Already widely used for controlling Kyma with the Nintendo Wiimote and Jazz Mutant's Lemur touch surfaces, Camille's new version of OSCulator now includes support for the 3D Connexion Space Navigator. more...

23 Dec 2007 — In an interview with GameZone, sound designer/composer Kemal Amarasingham describes how he used a lawnmower and Kyma's REResonator to create animalistic animalistic language for Mage Knight Apocalypse. As Kemal puts it, ""We believe that when audio, visuals and gameplay are all tied into one another that all three become much stronger." For the full interview, see GameZone. more...

22 Dec 2007 — Thinking of interfacing Kyma with other software and hardware? Check out some of the offerings by your fellow Kyma-ites on the tweaky, including:

* AC Toolbox: Paul Berg's algorithmic composition toolbox, written in LISP, can generate and send control values directly to the Capybara via the Flame Firewire interface.

* Flame Max Objects by David Kiers: Send int/float controller values from Max to the Capybara through the Flame Firewire interface.

* Capy Max External by Greg Wuller: Like David's flame object, the capy object can send controller values from Max to the Capybara via the Firewire interface but it adds support for Global Maps as well as being a Universal Binary.

* AlphaTrack to OSC by Garth Paine: A Max app that uses JavaScript to parse the MIDI messages from the Frontier Designs Alphatrack, and output them as OSC messages. This allows users to seamlessly pass the control messages through OSCulator to Kyma (note that there is a new release of OSCulator at http://www.osculator.net). The app is downloadable from: http://www.activatedspace.com/software/Software.html more...

21 Dec 2007 — Sound designer Dustin Camilleri has posted the first in what he plans to be a series of sample packs under the Creative Commons license. sndshare0107 focuses on ambient soundscapes and noises, all generated by patches he designed in Kyma. According to Dustin, you're free to use these samples in whatever way you'd wish as long as you drop him a line and let him know how you're using them. Dustin's goal is to create a free-flowing sound exchange where anyone can upload/download anything. Create, reshape, share, collaborate! (woot!) more...

20 Dec 2007 — Melissa Stark's Voices is a CD of evocative soundscapes realized in Kyma and mixed in Pro Tools. You can listen to excerpts from this work in progress on bMuze where you can also vote for your favorites. In the track titled Fall of Mercury we hear the whispers of a race of Mercurians even after their planet falls into the gravitational field of the sun. more...

18 Dec 2007 — Is it a wave? Is it a particle? No, it's both (and Egypt too)! Experience Greg Hunter's "smooth mix of crunchy glitch covered in a rich ethnodelic sauce" on his new "Lake of Dreams" podcast. "Love is the only miracle there is." more...

07 Dec 2007 — Ghost Strings, audio CD by Patricia Strange, violin (2006). A collection of five compositions for violin and computer processing including Ghost String by Jeffrey Stolet (2005) and Lyra by Brian Belet (2002). IMG Media CD-02-01, 2006. more...

28 Nov 2007 — Check out Cristian Vogel's crisply entrancing Never Engine videos on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s19NYeEDB0A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb9IEKDVI3U

And Cristian's music for choreographer Gilles Jobin's dance company here: http://www.no-future.com/erutufon/showthread.php?t=25019 more...

27 Oct 2007 — If some of the tracks on AARDE A Whole Day (DirtyCDR 025) seem to evolve like slow surges of the deep sea or suggest the mesmerizing thrum of engines, the rush of water or screeches of gulls, the explanation could lie in this one unusual fact. Lois Laplace is both composer and a professional sailor. Aarde is a collaboration of Laplace on Kyma, and Guillaume Gargaud on computer and prepared guitar. Laplace, who describes the sound of Kyma as "very pure," has a talent for revealing subtle and delicate details in the midst of an industrial environment like a commercial ship. Whether focusing intently on the minutest variations of light reflecting off the surface of the water or constructing soundscapes of soothing engine drones with in-your-ear glitches and mysteriously delicate noise bands that evolve at just the right pace, Aarde's music is simultaneously vast and delicate: truly minimalist without ever becoming boring. You can listen to some of the tracks on Virb and order the CD from Dirty Demos. 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...

11 Oct 2007 — Providing enhanced support for multichannel sound synthesis, processing, mixing and recording, Kyma X.47 is now available as a free update to registered Kyma X users. Also included with the release are over 150 new multichannel Sounds for the Kyma Sound Library. more...

08 Oct 2007 — Cristian Vogel's The NeverEngine is a collection of recordings synthesized using his own custom sequencing algorithms in Kyma for interpolating between data-states, sliding beats into bleeps and tones into drones. Vogel has been overseeing the refinement and evolution of these interpolating state engines, and in tresor.321, he presents the first chapter documenting the sonic results of this concentrated research and development. 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...

10 Sep 2007 — Musician/Remixer/Producer, DC, used Kyma for synthesis and processing of the NIN (Nine Inch Nails) song Only from their release With Teeth. The Remix title is: Melon Cucumber Headphone Remix by DC 4 defrostMusic. defrostMusic is DC's music production company with credits including the Grammy-Award-Winning "Just Chillin'" by Norman Brown, Al Jarreau, George Benson, Bob James and others... more...

21 Aug 2007 — Kemal Amarasingham, creative director at dSonic, used Kyma to generate ambient sounds and process voices for Irrational Games (now 2k Boston), new title: BioShock. dSonic was responsible for all the voice processing on the audio logs, radios, PA announcements, TVs etc., as well creating the sound effects for the plasmid weapons and ambient sounds for 5 of the levels in the game. more...

19 Aug 2007 — USO Project (Federico Placidi and Matteo Milani) have released Prelude of Noises, a Kyma-generated homage to Musique concrète as a free video on their blog. more...

13 Aug 2007 — On August 13, 2007, Outersect (Rob Rayle) released his worldwide debut solo album, Caldera, nine tracks combining acoustic vocals, instruments, and electronics in a variety of psychedelic downtempo styles ranging from dub to ethnotechno. Caldera is a spiritually motivated album intended to reach out to people using spiritual psychedelic music in order to help them move towards a higher understanding. You can hear lots of Kyma on the CD (including some new synthesis algorithms that Rob programmed for himself using DSP assembly language). In particular, listen to Track 7 (almost everything is Kyma or Kyma-processed) and Track 9 (the pedal-steel lead sound is Kyma), plus there are various Kyma sounds interspersed throughout the album. Check http://www.outersect.net for more information on the album and upcoming live dates. The name of the album comes from a free event Rayle hosted inside the caldera of an extremely large volcano in the Eastern Sierra. more...

22 Jul 2007 — Lots of Kyma applied in the mixing and performance of the debut album from Cristian Vogel's latest band endeavour, Night of the Brain. more...

30 May 2007 — In May, Treyarch released its Spiderman-III game, featuring an original musical score with Kyma processing by Tobias Enhus and Kyma-assisted sound design by Brian Fredrickson. more...

14 Jun 2006 — Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi have released USO (Unidentified Sound Object), an exuberant journey through spaces (literal and abstract) populated by elementary particles organizing themselves into increasingly complex structures. The sound quality is superb and it's obvious that Placidi and Milani share a genuine love for sound exploration. Listen on your DVD player or with VLC media player for the 4-channel surround sound experience! You can hear an excerpt on U.S.O. Project, and order the DTS Music Disc from CDeMUSIC or Music Zeit Download Platform (formats: mp3/flac). more...

Events

Vienna, 24-26 Sep 2010 — Check out the preliminary program for the Kyma International Sound Symposium at http://www.tonsalon.at/KISS2010/index.php/program/schedule. If it sounds interesting, please join the fun by registering here: http://www.tonsalon.at/KISS2010/index.php/registration/registrationform more...

Vienna, 30 Aug 2010 — The registration deadline for KISS2010 is fast approaching! The Kyma International Sound Symposium is a place to share your ideas, experiences and results with fellow Kyma practitioners in a relaxed, fun, and stimulating environment; KISS2010 will be three days packed with music, technology, philosophical discussions, and Kyma master classes. Commenting on last year's symposium, Federico Placidi and Matteo Milani wrote: The lectures performed during these 2 days taught us something: regardless of their own personal skills, and of their own degree of Kyma knowledge, observing things from other users' point of view reveals unexpected surprises and creates new connections, on a mental and operational level, which were never considered before. You can read their full report (with photos) on the Unidentified Sound Object blog and an additional slideshow.

This year's symposium is scheduled for 24-26 September 2010 in the newly renovated Rhiz Bar Modern Casino Baumgarten ballroom in Vienna, Austria. Whether you are a Kyma expert, a Kyma beginner, or just Kyma-curious, you are cordially invited to join us for three days of learning, sharing, meeting, and fun!  Here's a direct link to the registration form: http://tonsalon.at/KISS2010/index.php?option=com_civicrm&task=civicrm/event/register&id=1&reset=1 more...

Berlin, 13 Aug 2010 — RetroInterrupt is the name for Cristian Vogel's most recent audio/video project, in which he controls his Kyma NeverEngine at the pixel level by way of his own animated graphic interfaces created in Processing. He performed on the 13th of August 2010 at the Krake Festival for Experimental Dance Music in Berlin and on the 20th of August 2010 at Elektronisk Jazz Juice in Aarhus. more...

Berlin, 29 Jul 2010 — Richard Barrett used Kyma on an 8-channel fixed media piece entitled "SIMORGH" for a concert in Berlin that was part of the INVENTIONEN 2010 festival. Since he had only two weeks in which to both learn Kyma and compose the music, Richard says that this first piece was just scratching the surface of Kyma, but that "there's always something inspiring about such high-pressure situations." He's looking forward to integrating Kyma into his live performance setup for his next piece. Visit the Festival site and click on "Konzerte" at upper left, and then scroll down to find Richard. more...

Eugene, 19 Jul 2010 — At the University of Oregon, in July 2010, Jeffrey Stolet taught a two-week intensive course in electro-acoustic music centered on Kyma for a group of students from the Central Conservatory in Beijing. Their professors from the conservatory reported back that the students were inspired by the course and by how hard Professor Stolet and his graduate assistants made everyone work. Both the students and the professors named the Summer Academy a big success! more...

London, 08 Jul 2010 — Composer Robert Jarvis' proposal Around North is a finalist for the controversial PRS New Music Award, a prize that encourages creators to "push the boundaries of their artistic practice." extend "the possibilities of music," and seeks to stimulate debate on the question: what is music? Robert's proposal is, in a sense, a 21st century music of the spheres (he consulted with fellow Kyma-ist and physicist David McClain to confirm the accuracy of the equations). You can hear more about the piece (and vote for it!) by visiting the Foundation website above. Voting ends at midnight, Sunday, 5th September, 2010. more...

Water Mill, NY, 05 Jul 2010 — Leonardo Gala is currently researching composers of electronic music from Latin America for a new book to be published within the next two years. He is seeking biographical and contact information from any composers who are utilizing Symbolic Sound products. This work will cover the years from 1975 - 2010 and will include education, equipment usage, and recording studio use, performance formats, recordings and scores, where available. Please contact galadotcom7@gmail.com (or by mail at: PO Box 888 Water Mill NY 11976) more...

Athens, OH, 02 Jul 2010 — Mark Phillips forwarded some photos of a pet capybara with size comparison to a guinea pig (no pacas or pacaranas though). more...

Oakland, 21 Jun 2010 — Silvia Matheus and Thomas Miley were featured in this year's time-honored summer solstice event: "Garden of Memory". The venue is a labyrinth, Julia Morgan-designed columbarium, and mausoleum replete with gardens, fountains, and stained-glass skylights. The concert, described by the San Francisco Chronicle as "a walk-through fun house of musical and visual splendor," also featured Bay area composers and performers Pamela Z, Amy X Neuburg, Ellen Fullman & Theresa Wong, Fred Frith, Beth Custer, Gyan Riley, the William Winant Percussion Ensemble, Sarah Cahill, Ken Ueno, Paul Dresher and Joel Davel, Kitka, the Cardew Choir, Adam Fong, Maggi Payne, Monique Buzzarte, Luciano Chessa, Dan Plonsey's Daniel Popsicle, Krys Bobrowski Wobbly, and others. Silvia got a special mention in this review and a description of a spontaneous improvisation with concert-goers in the last paragraph of this blog entry. more...

Portsmouth PO1 3BF, 17 June - 1 August 2010 — KEYBIRD (2006) - an interactive installation comprising of a musical keyboard that plays birdsong - is an invited work at the Aspex Gallery's "The Great Outdoors" exhibition.

The Keybird emits a different bird call for every note that is pressed, allowing players to contrast and compare the different songs, and allowing them to compose imaginary dawn choruses. By interacting with the work, players are encouraged to move between the role of observer, as they identify the different species through their different musical signatures, and that of composer as they treat the calls as musical phrases in their own right.

The installation aims to create for its users a lighthearted yet deep connection with bird song in general, and by extension the soundscape. As the Keybird notes are physically played a mental connection with the sound is made with the result that sounds are subconsciously ‘lodged’ in short-term memory, and listening is heightened, at least for a short while. The installation gives time to its players to enquire, to play and to share the sounds, preparing the mind for an enhanced listening experience. Players of Keybird notice that they will begin to hear the detail in the different bird calls as well as hear sounds they never heard before, and the world will never quite sound the same to them again.

The birdsong featured is taken from the observational notes made by a Rye Harbour RSPB Warden over the course of one bird-watching year, and so is representative of the range of birds that can be found in the South of England. The calls of 76 different birds are arranged in alphabetical order along the keyboard and the visitor is left to experiment with playing the different notes, to contrast and compare and to compose their own compositions. more...

Standon Lane, Ockley, Surrey RH5 5QR, 01 May 2010 — Situated in a secluded part of the Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden, Robert Jarvis' gr0w sound installation takes its inspiration from the genetic makeup of the surrounding plants growing nearby. The music was composed entirely in Kyma, utilising Harm Visser's physical modelling toolkit, as well as advice and input from the Kyma community.

Visitors to the garden hear fast moving but gentle musical patterns derived from the plants' DNA mixed with contrasting slower melodies based on different amino acid sequences governing the processes of growth and aging. The sounds slowly fade in, teasing the ears with their presence, and quietly dance around the pond before fading out again returning the listener to the garden's gentle soundscape. The genetically inspired compositions add a subtle presence to the surroundings - not in competition with the garden's natural soundscape, but complementing it: hinting at the unseen processes connected with the plants' growth. The result is an experience that connects the listener to the hidden but ever present micro-world of genetic activity and the underlying processes of life itself.

more...

San Jose, 20 Apr 2010 — The annual spring concert at San Jose State University featured performances of Scott Miller's 'Fun House' for bass clarinet and Kyma, Allen Strange's 'Misty Magic Land,' realized from the composer's notes by Brian Belet, and Belet's '(Disturbed) Radiance' for piano and Kyma, performed by Janis Mercer. more...

Armagh, 16 Apr - 15 May 2010 — Building on his previous work in investigating different soundscapes, Robert Jarvis' latest sound installation is inspired by the City of Armagh, in Northern Ireland. Entitled, Armaghoclock, the work takes the form of a virtual timepiece utilising the whole of the Main Gallery space, and playing a different sound recorded from around the City every minute. With the aid of twelve loudspeakers positioned around the gallery in similar manner to the numbers around the circumference of a clock face, each of the sounds pans around the gallery space imitating the sweep of a clock’s second hand. The recordings range from the intimate to the well-known: from church bells to the pet shop's talking cockatoo - from pre-natal ultrasound to grave digging - referencing local trades, leisure and nature. Together, they combine to give their own account of the City’s identity, the people within it, and our changing soundscape. more...

Lisbon, 15 Apr 2010 — 25 Years/ 50 Composers/ 100 Minutes more...

Saint Cloud, Minnesota, 11 Apr 2010 — Many of us had the pleasure of meeting or renewing our connections with composer James Brody during the April SEAMUS Kyma workshop, only to be shocked and saddened by the news that James and his friend, composer Franz Kamin were killed in a car accident in Roseville, Minnesota the day after the conference. During SEAMUS several of us had been in the middle of an ongoing discussion with James on complexity theory, bird songs, random number generators and The Taos Hum. Yes, he had heard it, but he explained that it is not just in Taos where you can hear it: The Hum. James had been enthusiastically involved in organizing a music & complexity series at The Complex in Santa Fe . If you would like to honor a colleague while, at the same time supporting an organization dedicated to the connections between complexity, science, and the arts, please visit this site, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click the James Brody Memorial Fund for art & performance. Good bye, James. We salute a fellow explorer of the interface between sound and science! more...

St. Cloud, 07 Apr 2010 — Curious to learn more about Kyma? Carla Scaletti will present a full-day Kyma master class on Wednesday April 7 2010, in conjunction with the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the US (SEAMUS) national conference in St. Cloud, Minnesota. The course is free with conference registration.

If you'd like to participate in the master class and are unable to attend the conference itself, please send email to Symbolic Sound to reserve a place: info-kyma@symbolicsound.com. The SEAMUS conference is 3 solid days and nights of electronic music concerts and presentations (including several live Kyma/Paca(rana) performances). more...

Margate, 02 - 20 Apr 2010 — Recently nominated for the British Composer Awards, Robert Jarvis’ insect inspired surround sound installation, ENTOMOPHONIX is to be featured as part of "Insect World" - a themed exhibition for the newly opened Marine Studios, in Margate, Kent, UK.

The soundwork was originally created as part of a residency at La Cité des Insectes during the summer of 2007, and is also featured as a permanent sound installation there.

To create the composition, Robert set about the challenging task of recording the sounds of the various insects that inhabit the museum’s grounds. This took some time! Of particular interest were those nuances of sound inherent in the various insect calls that we almost never hear, and yet must be there for a reason. He was also interested in what could be learnt about sonic communication from studying these sounds and what implications there might be in relation to his work as a composer. After devising various methods for recording the different sounds (how to record an ants’ nest, for example, or a fly cleaning its wings) the sounds were then edited into a useable palette for musical composition and the piece was created. His aim was to create something that would allow the listener access to the unique sound world of these small creatures, allowing the listener to imagine life through the ears of an insect.

Whilst creating Entomophonix Robert also kept a weblog of his discoveries and thoughts and this can be seen at www.entomophonix.wordpress.com more...

Dresden, 26 Mar 2010 — Sarth Calhoun performed Kyma and Continuum with Lucibel Crater at the Jazzwelten Festival in Dresden on 26 March and as one third of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Trio during their April 2010 UK & European Tour, and May concerts in Sydney, Australia. more...

Eugene, 27 Feb 2010 — Several new works for Kyma performed live from a Wacom tablet were premiered at a Future Music Oregon concert in February 2010. Chi Wang, Kevin Drake, Jon Bellona, and Jenifer Jaseau, graduate students of composer Jeffrey Stolet, performed the new pieces live at the Thelma Schnitzer Hall at the University of Oregon School of Music. more...

Faversham, 06 Feb 2010 — Sometimes, it's nice to be reminded that not all sounds and sequences are generated electronically. In this video clip, Robert Jarvis joins his neighbors, singer Chris Wood and inventor/music saw virtuoso Henry Dagg for a bit of mechanical sequencing and breath-powered signal generation. more...

Geneva, 28 Jan 2010 — Swiss television presented a 28 minute HD documentary on choreographer Gilles Jobin's new dance work, Black Swan, with particular emphasis on his collaboration with composer Cristian Vogel. The documentary illustrates the ways in which choreographer, composer, and dancers collaborate throughout the development of the work, and includes some close-up shots of Cristian's Virtual Control Surface as well as excerpts from the dance from initial explorations, to rehearsals, to the premiere performance. more...

Dallas, 15 Jan 2010 — Austin-based composer William H. Meadows utilized OSCulator to connect multiple Nintendo Wiimotes to Kyma for a 15 January 2010 performance of The Butterfly Effect and Other Beautiful Catastrophes at The Center for Creative Connections at the Dallas Museum of Art. Meadows, in collaboration with choreographer Kerry Kreiman and members of the CD/FW dance company, used the Wiimotes to transform dancers' movements into controllers for sounds being generated live in Kyma to highlight the interplay between the physical and virtual worlds. Each performance of the piece is unique, the structure being based on concepts from chaos and catastrophe theory. A reviewer for the Fort Worth Star Telegram described the premiere: ...a fascinating kaleidoscope of sound and movement... It was a strange and wonderful scene. For more details, see Pegasus News. more...

Rome, 10 Jan 2010 — Each semester, Federico Placidi teaches a 20-hour module on Sound Design Sculpting in Kyma as part of the Electronic Music course at the Istituto Italiano per le Tecnologie Musicale in Rome. more...

Bourges, 08 Jan 2010 — Scott Miller's Nebe na Zemi (Heaven on Earth) was selected for the 36th Bourges International Competitions Electroacoustic Music and Electronic Art 2009 Competition in the Quadrivium - 6th category: work for installation or environment. According to Miller: "I quite literally couldn't have done it without Kyma!" Miller is working with long-time collaborator Pat O'Keefe preparing to record a new CD featuring works for clarinet, bass clarinet, interactive electronics, and improvisation. more...

Torino, 03 Dec 2009 — Composer Federico Placidi's new work Solo for Clarinet in B flat, Cello and Live Electronics and Kyma was premiered in Torino in December, 2009. Fiarì Ensemble organizes a contemporary music series of concerts, In scena, in Turin. The last concert of the festival, Call for Scores, combines electronic processing of sound to the ductility of the Fiarì Ensemble. Placidi performed the live processing and Matteo Milani did the sound diffusion using a Jazz Mutant Lemur tablet. more...

London, 01 Dec 2009 — ENTOMOPHONIX – Robert Jarvis’s sound installation for La Cité des Insectes, in Chaud, France, has been selected as one of two finalists for this year’s British Composer Awards in their Sonic Art category. The awards will be announced at a special event at the Law Society in London on Tuesday 1st December, and will be broadcast the following evening on BBC Radio 3 from 7pm.

The surround sound composition was originally created as part of a residency at La Cité des Insectes during the summer of 2007, and is now featured as a permanent sound installation there.

To create the composition, Robert first of all set about the challenging task of recording the sounds of the various insects that inhabit the museum’s grounds. This took some time! Of particular interest were those nuances of sound inherent in the various insect calls that we almost never hear, and yet must be there for a reason. He was also interested in what could be learnt about sonic communication from studying these sounds and what implications there might be in relation to his work as a composer. After devising various methods for recording the different sounds (how to record an ants’ nest, for example, or a fly cleaning its wings) the sounds were then edited into a useable palette for musical composition and the piece was created. His aim was to create something that would allow the listener access to the unique sound world of these small creatures, allowing the listener to imagine life through the ears of an insect.

Whilst creating Entomophonix Robert also kept a weblog of his discoveries and thoughts and this can be seen at www.entomophonix.wordpress.com

Nominations for all thirteen categories of the awards can be seen at: www.britishcomposerawards.com . more...

Como, 18 Nov 2009 — Composer Agostino Di Scipio presented a 3-day workshop in Como, Italy (near the Swiss border) with students and professors from the local conservatory. During the final concert, they performed Audible Ecosystemics n.2a (Feedback Study) and n.3a (Background Noise Study), Texture/Multiple (with 5 instruments & electronics), and 6 Studi (for piano & electronics). more...

Oxfordshire, 01 Nov 2009 — Robert Jarvis' latest composition is a soundscape work for BBC Radio Oxford, taking its inspiration as well as all of its material from recordings made within the county over the last six months - notably using those sounds that are in someway defining of place and contribute to the county's aural heritage.

Since April, Robert has been working with the BBC, its listeners and diverse communities around the County collecting people's favourite sounds as well as their stories, and these have been featured on radio, television and online. The resulting work will be broadcast on 1st November at 9pm as part of an hour's programme focusing on the process that led to the piece's creation and will be able to be listened to within Oxfordshire on 95.2FM, on the BBC Oxford website (www.bbc.co.uk/oxford) and also on the BBC's 'Listen Again' service for up to seven days after the broadcast. more...

Mannheim, 24 Oct 2009 — A schedule of live performances of pieces from Ambrose Field's album Being Dufay is available on the album's website. You can read more about his use of Kyma on the album here. more...

Oneonta, New York, 20 Oct 2009 — On October 20, 2009, composer Scott Miller was inducted into the Music Hall of Fame and received an alumni achievement award from his undergraduate alma mater, SUNY-Oneonta. On the first evening, Miller presented a concert of Kyma-based interactive music (composed and structured improvisations) with clarinetist Calvin Falwell and trumpeter Ben Aldridge and, on the second night, he participated in a concert with atom3, an electroacoustic improv group. He also presented lectures at SUNY-Oneonta and Hartwick College on his music—including a lecture entitled Collaboration as Concept. According to Scott, now that he has a Paca, this was the first time he was able to bring his Kyma rig as carry-on luggage. Everything, including his laptop, fit in a Hardigg Storm iM2500 case. more...

Limoges, 16 Oct - 21 Nov 2009 (except Sundays) — Robert Jarvis' insect inspired sound installation is currently featured as part of Patrick Bleuzen's "Des Insectes et des Hommes" exhibition, on show at Espace Noriac in Limoges France.

Imagine a room full of butterflies… Imagine living in a beehive or an ants’ nest… Imagine going for a ride on a back of a dragonfly… what would that sound like? Entomophonix allows the listener access to this unique sound world and to imagine life through the ears of an insect.... more...

Oslo, 10 Oct 2009 — New contemporary dance performance with electronic music composed by Petter Wiik, who has utilized his Paca for around 50 % of the audio (durata: 50 min.). Wiik uses Live/Kore 2/Novation 61 SL during the show. more...

Barcelona, 08-10 Oct 2009 — The First International Kyma Symposium is scheduled for 8-10 October 2009 in the vibrant Poble Nou neighborhood of Barcelona during the annual LEM festival. The preliminary program includes master classes presented by the creators of Kyma, papers and demos presented by Kyma practitioners, and a program of concerts, live improvised silent film scores, and culminating with Saturday night/Sunday morning dancing at the Moog to Cristian Vogel's live Kyma set. You are invited to learn, to share, to meet, and to enjoy!

For up-to-the-minute information on schedules, maps, accommodations, travel, and discussions, please join the Erutufon Forum (there is no cost to join the forum).

Symposium Program

Register for Symposium

more...

Barcelona, 07 Oct 2009 — Cristian Vogel provided interactive sound for the October 7, 2009 opening of Used Abused and Amused by Santiago Taccetti and Natalia Ibanez Lario at the TWAIN (totally without an interesting name) gallery in Barcelona. Vogel placed contact mics on black-painted papier-mâché balls suspended from orange cables in the gallery such that, when gallery visitors hit the sculpture, it triggered a grain cloud explosion in Kyma. In this video, you can see enthusiastic gallery visitors happily kicking, punching, and swinging the ersatz piñatas to be showered with chalk, glitter, and glass beads (and in the background you can catch glimpses of Cristian Vogel, Kyma, Kurt Hebel, and Carla Scaletti who were in Barcelona for the Kyma symposium which started later that week. more...

York, 29 Sep 2009 — TaylorDeupree was invited to do a residency with the New Aesthetics in Computer Music research project at The University Of York. Taylor was invited to create a new piece for Kyma-processed gamelan and to hold interviews and discussions on his role in the emergence of the microsound movement. more...

Atlanta, 27 Sep 2009 — The Hassler-Robinson duo (Don Hassler and Dick Robinson) performed a live, free electronic improvisation on September 27, 2009 from 7-8 PM at the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Hassler performed on the Buchla 200-E modular electronic music instrument, and Robinson's instrument was the Kyma/Pacarana. The concert was part of a month-long fundraising Arts Festival at the Atlanta Soto Zen Center, including a performance by the Hallucination Sextet: Dick Robinson, Jerry Cullum, and four virtual performers. more...

Tel Aviv, 25 Sep 2009 — Avi Benjamin and Michael Vaisburd presented their new collaboration project, 'AVI Channel', on September 25, 2009 in Tel Aviv. Envisioned as "sound tracks from imaginary films", AVI Channel embodies the artistic partners' energetic embrace of all music and sound genres, from classical to rock to jazz to electronic, to opera, to world music, live voice-processing, and even cuckoo clocks. Beethoven is a trope on a Beethoven piano sonata evoking Berio's Sinfonia in the logic and richness of its overlays of textures and styles. Did you ever have the feeling? is at various points lively, humorous, wild, and zen. Seated in a cabaret setting, the audience is treated to an energetic spectacle including a full-sized Continuum controlling Pacarana aggregate and additive synthesis, a couple of electronic keyboards, a grand piano, "virtual" performers appearing iChat-like on laptop screens and a trumpet player placed in the audience. Benjamin and Vaisburd are, respectively, musical director and sound designer for the Gesher Theatre, and their sense for staging and drama, along with Benjamin's training as a classical pianist and composer are very much in evidence. The audience responded enthusiastically and is now primed and ready for the next installment in this ongoing project. more...

Ottawa, 28-30 Aug 2009 — TangLed LYSerGic PuddLEs oN CeLEstiAL thReads aka Adam Sobel can be seen using his Kyma/Pacarana system in his live set at Anishnabe Festival in Ottawa Canada: http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewImage&friendID=312639020&albumID=259134&imageID=12263401 more...

Gothenburg, 12 Aug 2009 — On the 12th of August 2009, composer/organist Franz Danksagmüller will be performing his Kyma live to create an improvised score for Fritz Lang's silent science fiction masterpiece Metropolis as part of the Göteborg International Film Festival. The performance starts at 21:30 in the Movietheater ROY (Kungsportsavenyn 45). more...

Chicago, 09 Aug 2009 — Sarth Calhoun is currently touring in Europe with Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, and Sarth's Kyma system this summer (for upcoming dates, visit http://www.loureed.com and click the Blue Banner). In August, Sarth will be joining Lou Reed and his band at Lollapalooza in Chicago. more...

Eugene, OR, 28 Jul 2009 — Conductor/composer Robert Ponto used Kyma to reconstruct a performance of Stockhausen's SOLO (originally done with analog delays). Brian McWhorter is the soloist. more...

Grand Forks, ND, 13 Jul 2009 — Composer Michael Wittgraf has been awarded a Dakota Creative Connections grant in support of his work on a new quadraphonic work for 60-voice choir and Kyma. more...

Salzau, 04 Jul 2009 — Stanley Cowell, pianist/composer, has been using Kyma live on tour with Nasheet Waits' quartet, Equality in performances at Jazz Baltica festival in Salzau, Germany July 4th, 2009, on German Radio and 3SAT broadcasts, and at Club Mix, Jazz à Vienne (France) Festival, July 6th, 2009. more...

Margate, 27 Jun 2009 — (not exactly new, but still going strong...)

KEYBIRD (2006) is an interactive installation comprising of a musical keyboard that instead of playing musical notes, has a different birdsong on every key. Visitors see the musical keyboard and are drawn to playing some of the notes. After a brief moment of surprise and puzzlement, whilst the connection is made with the birdsong that results from the pressing of the keys, an exploration of the instrument ensues. As players contrast and compare the different calls and compose imaginary dawn choruses, they move between the roles of observer, as they identify the different species through their different musical signatures, and that of composer as they treat the calls as musical phrases in their own right.

The installation aims to create for its users a lighthearted yet deep connection with bird song in general, and by extension the soundscape. As the Keybird notes are physically played a mental connection with the sound is made, with the result that sounds are subconsciously ‘lodged’ in short-term memory, with the effect that listening is heightened, at least for a short while. The installation gives time to its players to enquire, to play and to share the sounds, preparing the mind for an enhanced listening experience. Players of Keybird notice that they will begin to hear the detail in the different bird calls as well as hear sounds they never heard before, and the world will never quite sound the same to them again.

The birdsong featured is taken from the observational notes made by a Rye Harbour RSPB Warden over the course of one bird-watching year, and so is representative of the range of birds that can be found in the South of England. The calls of 76 different birds are arranged in alphabetical order along the keyboard and the visitor is left to experiment with playing the different notes, to contrast and compare and to compose their own compositions. more...

Paris, 26 Jun 2009 — Camille Troillard introduced his Kyma/Pacarana rig into a Neïmo live show for the first time during their June 2009 performance at the largest school gala in France: the École Polytechnique's Gala. It was a memorable performance, and not just because of the Kyma vocalizations; halfway through the show, Neïmo's drummer Vincent Girault broke the head of the bass drum and the audience filled in by clapping until he could patch it with gaffer's tape. Here is some video from Neïmo's performance at Solidays in Paris on the 26th of June as part of an anti AIDS music festival. more...

NYC, 20 Jun 2009 — On Saturday, June 20, at 9PM EDT (Sunday, June 21, 1AM GMT) Richard Lainhart joined 23 other performers from seven countries on electro-music.com's Summer Solstice 09 Online Streaming Concert. To mark the solstice, Lainhart performed a live, hour-long set of One Sound: music for electric guitar and lapsteel processed through the Kyma CrossFilter. For more information, please visit the event's web page. more...

Darlington, Maryland, 11-14 Jun 2009 — Tangled Lysergic Puddles On Celestial Threads, the streaming psychic presentation of producer Adam Sobel, used Kyma to generate live organic beats, ripping blissful bass, auditory illusions, and sacred sounds for the 8th Annual GAIAN MIND SUMMER FESTIVAL June 11th through June 14th, 2009 at Ramblewood in Darlington, Maryland. The GAIAN MIND SUMMER FESTIVAL is the longest-running Psytrance Festival in the US and draws hundreds of dancers from around the world. Adam has also been busy in recording sessions, including a track called Breaking Gravity for Mind Warp Records' Mind Over Reality compilation. more...

Grinton, North Yorkshire, 25 May 2009 — Robert Jarvis' Echolocation installation will be featured at this year's Swaledale Festival in Yorkshire, England on Spring Bank Holiday in May.

On this occasion the installation will be set up around St Andrew's Church in the village of Grinton, in the Yorkshire Dales, UK.

As the bats come into the graveyard(!) to feed at around 10pm, Robert's installation will pick up their ultrasonic biosonar calls and, with the help of Kyma, utilise the inherent frequency, amplitude and bandwidth information to control an algorithimic score.

Visitors to the installation will be treated to a surround sound experience where they can listen to Robert's interpretation of the bats' ultrasonic activity at the same time as seeing the bats flitter in and out of strategically placed beams of light.

more...

(near) Oxford, 08 -09 May 2009 — For two special evenings this May, sound artist Robert Jarvis will take over Chimney Meadows nature reserve, in Oxfordshire, and turn it into a night-time sonic experience.

The event is presented in collaboration with Oxford Contemporary Music and the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust and builds on one of the most popular installations at last September's 'Magic Hour' at Oxford Botanic Garden.

As well as sound works inspired by the nocturnal wildlife at the Reserve there will also be activities, such as moth trapping, arranged by the Reserve itself, creating a complete experience for all those who attend.

The highlight of the evening will be the latest version of Robert's Echolocation sound installation. As the Bats come out to search for food and feed along the Reserve's canal they will emit their radar sounds. Using a series of strategically placed bat detectors, Robert's installation transforms these signals into an evocative surround sound musical experience as night falls.

Come and enjoy this extraordinary musical experience celebrating this often unheard wonder of nature.

Please note: The event will involve some walking around the nature reserve on easy tracks, with the installation taking place 2km (30 minutes on foot) from the car park, alongside the River Thames. Please wear clothes and footwear suitable for a countryside walk and possible wet weather. Bring a torch! The site is wheelchair accessible. more...

New York, 02 May 2009 — Phil Curtis performed live electronics using Kyma for Anne LeBaron's opera Crescent City with the New York City Opera at the Vox 2009 Festival, at 3:30 pm on May 2nd at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at NYU. In a mythical city between two hurricanes, will the Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau and two lone cops (one of them a ghost) be able to save the city from the storm, the anarchic Revelers, the roving ghosts of murderers, and five ambivalent Loa summoned by Marie? Phil Curtis (referred to as "the laptop player" can be seen briefly in the video on this page generating what LeBaron calls "atmospheric electronica" to give the orchestra an "otherworldly sound". more...

OXFORDSHIRE, 23 Apr - 25 Oct 2009 — Sounds of Oxfordshire - a six month project bringing together sound artist Robert Jarvis, BBC Radio Oxford and Oxford Contemporary Music and the people of Oxfordshire.

Between April and October Robert will work with the BBC and its listeners to collect people’s favourite, most meaningful, or characterful sounds that somehow help define their county of Oxfordshire. Through an extensive outreach programme, people of all ages will be encouraged to submit descriptions of sounds that they find particularly appealing, perhaps because the sounds are special to an area, or defining of a particular time, or maybe because they are disliked, or in danger of disappearing. The sounds and the stories connected with them will be broadcast on radio, TV and online and eventually incorporated into a Kyma created score for radio broadcast, CD release, and a touring installation. more...

New York, 23-24 Apr 2009 — Metal Machine Trio presents a night of deep noise featuring Lou Reed on guitar, Ulrich Krieger on tenor sax, and Sarth Calhoun on Continuum fingerboard controlling live Kyma electronics. From an LA Times review of the trio's performance last year at Red Cat: Calhoun, using a laptop, a keyboard and a sort of electronic slide instrument called a Haken Continuum Fretboard, added gut-shaking low notes, distortion and drone to the mix. Krieger responded aggressively, and Reed seemed to draw in the energy. Performances are at 8:30 pm Thursday and Friday 23-24 April 2009 at The Gramercy Theatre in New York, NY. No songs, no vocals, all deep noise! Tickets available at: http://www.livenation.com/edp/eventId/405388 more...

Brooklyn, NY, 21 Apr 2009 — Carla Scaletti will present a Composers' Forum lecture/demonstration on Using Kyma for Live Performance and Music Composition at Brooklyn College, Brooklyn Conservatory of Music on the 21st of April 2009, 12:30 to 2:00 pm, in Room 251 of The Gershwin Building. For more information, please send email to info-kyma@symbolicsound.com. more...

New York, NY, 20 Apr 2009 — Kurt Hebel and Carla Scaletti will be at Electronic Music Foundation's midtown Manhattan studio on Monday the 20th of April to give demonstrations of Kyma and the new Pacarana hardware. Prospective or current Kyma users who are interested in learning more about Kyma and seeing it in action, please send email to info-kyma@symbolicsound.com. (This event is free but space is quite limited so a reservation is required, thanks!) more...

Annecy, 21-23 Apr 2009 — Currently rehearsing in his studios in Geneva, choreographer Gilles Jobin will premiere his new creation BLACK SWAN with original music by Cristian Vogel in Bonlieu Scène nationale, Annecy (France) on the following dates:

Tuesday 21 April, 8.30 pm

Wednesday 22 April, 8.30 pm

Thursday 23 April, 8.30 pm

For more information on the tour , please visit: http://www.bonlieu-annecy.com/detail?date=042009&event=547/ more...

Brooklyn, NY, 16-19 Apr 2009 — Nearly Ninety, a new work composed by John Paul Jones in collaboration with Sonic Youth and mixed-media sound composer Takehisa Kosugi, will debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on April 16 2009 on the occasion of Merce Cunningham's 90th birthday. Jones has composed an evening-length work in the form of a complex Kyma Timeline with live multitracking, processing of live input, synthesis, and (in homage to John Cage) chance elements, which he will perform live at BAM April 16-19. Long a champion of improvisation and collaboration in dance, Cunningham and his dance company have worked with a number of musicians on past performances, including composer John Cage. For more information, see: http://www.gibson.com/en%2Dus/Lifestyle/News/john%2Dpaul%2Djones%2Dsonic%2D311/ more...

Ft. Wayne, IN, 16-18 Apr 2009 — The Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States' annual meeting will be at Sweetwater's new concert and lecture hall facilities April 16-18 2009. The theme of the conference is Human Interface Devices and the conference will feature a Kyma Master Class by Carla Scaletti and several Kyma-powered compositions on the concert programs including Brian Belet's System of Shadows for trumpet and Kyma, Scott Miller's Lovely Little Monster for clarinet and Kyma, Carla Scaletti's SlipStick for Continuum controlling Kyma, and Jeffrey Stolet's Gongs of Tiny Insects (fixed media, sounds created using Kyma). more...

London, 14 Apr 2009 — Yannis Kyriakides will be performing live sound for #37, with visuals by film-maker Joost Rekveld and presenting the first UK performance of Folia, his collaboration with guitarist Andy Moor. The Sound Source: Yannis Kyriakides' The Sound of Unsounds will also feature improvised saxophone by John Butcher. Visit Kyriakides' online Cabinet of Curiosities.

Concert dates are:

Tuesday 14 April: King's Place, London 19:30

Tuesday 28 April: Fuseleeds Festival, The Venue, Leeds College of Music 20:00

Wednesday 13 May: Sonorities Festival, Belfast. more...

Atlanta, 04 Apr 2009 — While Dick Robinson (live Kyma electronics) and Jerry Cullum (verbal improvisation) were performing at a Spruill Gallery special exhibit called PLAY, audience members spontaneously began joining in and were serendipitously picked up by the microphone and processed through Kyma, which, of course, enticed them to participate even more. The result was described as a riotously good time and greeted with insane applause at the end. The curator happily invited Robinson and Cullum to perform at the gallery again, any time they like! more...

San Francisco, 23-27 Mar 2009 — Mike Johnson, sound designer at Sony Computer Entertainment America, presented a talk at this year's GDC (Game Developers Conference) 23-27 March 2009 in San Francisco entitled Next Generation Sound Design. In his talk, Johnson detailed some ways in which game audio designers can develop more intriguing and compelling sound effects for games. One of the tools he highlighted was Kyma, which he described as his "Go To" tool for vocal processing and great surround ambience designs. In the real world examples segment, he showcased granular synthesis and cross synthesis sounds in Kyma for the audience. more...

Victoria, BC, 19 Feb 2009 — Composer Andrea Young will be presenting a concert of new works for voice and live electronics on February 19, 2009 in Victoria, BC, Canada. Compositions will include Agostino Di Scipio's Audible Ecosystemics No.3b, Hector Bravo Benard's Pink Noise, Juan Parra Cancino's Tu Recuerdo Manda, André Cormier's En Monochrome, Cassandra Miller's rendition of Falling in Love Again, and the world premiere of Andrea Young's Kokinshu.

Each work uses Kyma in a vastly different way, at times minimalist and subtle, and at other times maximally thunderous and noisy. The new works explore the inside of the mouth, the uncontrollable and infinitesimal squeaks, and the resonant classical tones—all multiplied and extended through Kyma to create a new voice with greatly expanded sonic capacity. more...

Minneapolis, 17-22 Feb 2009 — The Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts 2009 from February 17 - 22, 2009 featured the premier of Scott Miller's Lovely Little Monster for Trio Lorca (flute, clarinet, percussion) plus Kyma. Following the concert, Professor Miller was invited by a member of the audience to present a seminar at the University of Minnesota Brain Barriers Research Center discussing how he uses Kyma and the Paca. Several other Kyma artists were also featured at the festival, including Brett Wartchow, Steve Everett and Matt Malsky. more...

Los Angeles, 11 Feb 2009 — Lou Reed has formed a trio called Best Seat In The House featuring Lou on guitar, Ulrich Krieger on tenor sax and Sarth Calhoun doing live Kyma processing and performing the Continuum Fingerboard. The first release of the trio is a live recording of two nights live at the Redcat in Los Angeles, October 2 and 3, 2008. more...

St. Louis, 31 Jan 2009 — Rich O'Donnell, seesaw drummer and live Kyma electronics, teamed up with poet Anna Tseng Lum and hyperpianist Denman Maroney to create Kai Wan Sing (literally "open play sound") an improvisatory combination of poetry, electronics, and percussion. After a 5-city tour of China in 2007, the event had its North American premiere in St Louis last year. For news on future O'Donnell performances involving improvisation, Kyma processing, poetry, Tai Chi, and visual art, visit New Music Circle. more...

Oxford, 04-06 Sep 2008 — As part of Oxford Contemporary Music's "Magic Hour" event in collaboration with the Oxford Botanical Garden, Kyma user and sound installation artist, Robert Jarvis, will be showing a new work that takes its material, as well as inspiration, from the many bats that visit the garden each evening.

As the bats fly in, in search of food, they emit ultrasonic calls at a frequency above the human range of hearing. Jarvis's installation starts with these calls and processes them in Kyma to create a real-time musical composition for listeners to experience at the same time as viewing the bats.

Robert has been developing the concept of this work for about a year now, and it was recently shortlisted for the 2008 New Music Award (http://www.prsfoundation.co.uk/newmusicaward/echolocation.htm). The performances at Oxford Botanical Garden will be the first time the work has been performed publicly.

As well as the Echolocation installation, Robert has also created another piece in collaboration with students from the local St Barnabas' Primary School. This installation, entitled Predator takes its inspiration from the various insects introduced to the garden by the Botanical gardeners as part of their biological control programme. In a similar manner to how the biocontrol creatures are introduced as natural predators, so too this sound installation aims to introduce a form of audio-control for the public as darkness sets in. Multiple speakers hidden amongst the undergrowth will play short disturbing compositions designed to encourage listeners to move along and ultimately return home.

To track the compositional progress of both the Echolocation and Predator installations, you can read Robert Jarvis's blog at http://themagichour.wordpress.com . more...

Black Rock City, NV, 25 Aug - 3 Sept 2008 — Will Grant, playa name Blue Fire, the music co-lead for Entheon Village 2008, is seeking Kyma performers who already have tickets for Burning Man and who might be interested in participating with him in a sunset recital of Hindu-inspired music. The sound system will be a MacBook Pro and Capybara-320 through 6 Mackie 350v2's in a hexagon 35' across. You can contact him through his website. more...

Kingsport, 14-16 Aug 2008 — Howard Moscovitz' Electro-Music 2008—three days of experimental electronic music concerts, jam sessions, lectures, and demos—will be held from 14-16 August 2008 at the Renaissance Center in Kingsport, Tennessee. Covering a wide range of electronic music including circuit bending, computer music, electro-jazz, modular synthesis, musique concrete, improvisation, noodles (generated or automatic music and algorithmic composition), multi-media, visual art and more, the focus of the festival is on participant involvement, sharing, community development, audience education, and great music. A three-day pass is only $50. more...

Richmond, 12 Aug 2008 — Rob Rayle is playing several festivals this summer while continuing work on his second album (for which Rayle is using his own custom-coded Kyma physical modeling software on nearly every track). For more details on his current and future activities, visit his site. more...

Los Angeles, 31 Jul-Aug. 2 2008 — Phil Curtis and SoNu performed Anne LeBaron's opera Sucktion as part of the New Original Works Festival 2008 at the CalArts REDCAT Theate at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, July 31 - August 2, 2008. Phil used the Kyma/Osculator/Wii setup to turn a vacuum cleaner into a musical controller for LeBaron's tale of a woman's cyber-erotic transformation from abject housewife into a self-sufficient cyborg. Check SoNu's news page for more SoNu performances. more...

Brooklyn, 28 Jul 2008 — On July 28th, Sarth Calhoun's Lucibel Crater played a live show at Zebulon, a musician-owned cafe in Brooklyn, New York. more...

Berlin, 23 Jul 2008 — Agostino Di Scipio's Ecosystemic sound installation in 2 abandoned or dismantled rooms, OHNE TITLE/UNTITLED, was performed at Festival Inventionen 08 in Berlin on July 23, 2008. Kees Tazelaar's Crosstalk was performed on August 1st as part of the same festival. more...

Yamaguchi, 21 Jul 2008 — Gilles Jobin was invited to Japan this summer to present a production of TEXT TO SPEECH (music by Cristian Vogel) on 21 JULY - YAMAGUCHI CENTER FOR ARTS AND MEDIA - YAMAGUCHI, and on 25 & 26 JULY - SPIRAL ART CENTER - TOKYO. more...

Annecy, 25 Jun 2008 — In his fifth collaboration with Swiss choreographer Gilles Jobin, Cristian Vogel completed the sound design and music for Text to Speech exclusively in Kyma. Performed on 6 speakers, with front of house system, for a total of 7 sound sources and 8 sound emitters, the music draws its inspiration from shortwave and Very Low Frequency radio, the ambience and sonic palettes of natural radio, espionage counting stations, and radio hammers in addition to synthetic voices reading warped texts. Vogel composed the music on site in Annecy and Barcelona using the latest version of his track-dependent spectral resynthesis and modification design, dubbed Spectral Fire, to yield an array of track-dependent spectral delays, waveshaping, transposition and smearing. For more information on the music, the choreography, and the performances, see the Last.fm website. more...

Munich, 21 Jun 2008 — Swiss sound designer Daniel Dettwiler used Kyma in the creation of a permanent sound installation for BMW Platz, one of the largest rooms in the new BMW Museum in Munich, first opened to the public on June 21 2008. The walls of BMW Platz are giant screens displaying subtle pictures while a 300-speaker acousmonium plays granulated cello and piano sound textures generated in Kyma. For BMW, the aim was to create a museum where the architecture, media, and the audio all interact perfectly with the cars on display. Idee und Klang's proposal for the space was selected by a jury in an international competition held two years ago. more...

Pesaro, 16-17 Jun 2008 — From 16-18 June 2008, as part of Il Suono Aperto, Joel Chadabe presented a concert of electronic music and conducted master classes for Eugenio Giordani's students at the Conservatorio di Musica G. Rossini in Pesaro. Using the Kyma system owned by Eugenio Giordani (well-known to the international Kyma community as the creator of the EuVerb), Chadabe presented his Many Times... for live performer and Kyma in what Chadabe describes as a "gorgeous hall" having "wonderful acoustics." more...

San José, 14 Jun 2008 — Brian Belet's new piece Name Droppings includes the voice of Jeff Stolet and others reading excerpts from program notes and composers' bios lightly processed and assembled in Kyma. This piece was commissioned in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Experimental Music Studios at the University of Illinois. more...

Ottawa, 07-14 Jun 2008 — From 7-14 June 2008, composer Edmund Eagan and dance artist Ken Emig created hexagons of sound for a live installation based on the architecture of the National Arts Center in Ottawa. Starting at noon on Saturday June 7, Eagan and Emig performed outside the theatre using 3-channel sound and 6 cameras capturing a hexagonal 360 panorama projected through 6 projectors onto six walls enclosing a hexagonal fountain as a slightly different mix of the audio was presented inside the building. Live input from three amplified sources placed at the vertices of an equilateral triangle located around the center of the hexagonal dome pictured in the online article at Guerilla Magazine: 17 were processed live through Kyma. more...

Brooklyn, 30 May 2008 — The Bunker Podcast 23 features Cristian Vogel recorded live at The Bunker in Brooklyn on May 30, 2008 in a one hour improvisation using his Neverengine design and other Kyma Sounds. Everything is about live choices in this set (there are no sequences or presets), and it's exciting to hear how Vogel occasionally throws the whole thing into chaos and then reins it back into a more conventional groove. Listen also for the metric modulations and the smooth morphs between musical spaces where the changes along each parameter are so smooth, it feels like an optical illusion in time and acoustic space.

According to Cristian, "The sound quality is something that I have to refine all the time, because there are so few sound elements that it has to sound absolutely high-quality when it comes out of the generating algorithms. But Kyma makes that part easy, because it sounds so good loud!" So hook up your large speakers, turn up the volume, and have a listen! more...

Minneapolis, 29 May 2008 — Composer Scott Miller joined forces with Rosemary Williams, Pat O'Keefe, Jacqueline Ultan, Norah Long, & Jeff Lambert to investigate models and conceptions of measuring and experiencing time using Prague's Astronomical clock as a metaphor. Through multi-channel video projection, live performance and interactive electronic audio environments, The Cosmic Engine explores the tension between the strict architecture of time-telling and "the dissolution of that structure into absurdity and chaos." The Cosmic Engine premiered on May 30 & 31, 2008 as part of The Electric Eyes New Music and Media Festival at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis. more...

Mexico City, 26 May 2008 — On Monday, 26th May 2008, composer Hector Bravo-Benard performed fellow composer Agostino Di Scipio's Audible Ecosystemics 3b, Background Noise Study With Mouth Performer, at the 30th Foro Internacional de Musica Nueva Manuel Enriquez with Carmina Escobar. The concert was at the Blas Galindo Hall of the Centro Nacional de las Artes. more...

Palo Alto, 21 May 2008 — On May 21, 2008, Kelly Fitz used Kyma to play examples during his seminar, Techniques for Digital Sound Morphing, presented at the CCRMA Colloquium. more...

New York, 20-21 May 2008 — Kyma will be assisting the Flea in its stated mission of "Raising a joyful hell in a small space" as part of the three day Electronic Music Foundation EMF Lab concert series in New York, 20-21 May 2008. more...

Athens, 17-18 May 2008 — Carla Scaletti and Kurt Hebel will be participating in the ElectroMediaWorks Festival in Athens. On May 17, Scaletti will present a 3 hour seminar on Kyma at the Centre for Music Composition and Performance. On May 18, there will be a concert of live Kyma music by Carla Scaletti and Joel Chadabe. Both events are open to the public. From May 20-22, Chadabe and Scaletti have been invited by Andreas Mniestris to present seminars and workshops on Kyma for his composition students at Ionian University. more...

New York, 15 May 2008 — Sarth Calhoun and Lucibel Crater have a new website on which you can find news of their upcoming CD release party and celebratory performance at 7 pm this Thursday, May 15th at Joe's Pub in New York. more...

Athens, 14-18 May 2008 — The ElectroMediaWorks Festival EMW 08 will feature live electronics, interactive performances, electroacoustic music, video and installations in Athens 14-18 May 2008. Andreas Mniestris, Marinos Giannoukakis, Gerard Pape, Joel Chadabe, Carla Scaletti, Kurt Hebel, Robert Scott Thompson, Michael Filimovicz and others will be presenting work at the festival. On Sunday, May 18, starting at 14:30, there will be a three-hour seminar on Kyma followed by a concert of live Kyma music.

The week following, Scaletti, Chadabe, and Hebel will be presenting seminars at EPHMEE (the Electroacoustic Music Research and Applications Laboratory) at Ionian University directed by Andreas Mniestris. Check out the interviews and join in the discussion on the Forum. All events are free and open to the public at The Art Factory located at Lamias 6 & Pireos (after Praktiker). more...

Forlì, 13 May 2008 — On 3 May 2008, Agostino Di Scipio put on a concert at Teatro Diego Fabbri in Forlì (Italia). Di Scipio performed live electronics on his Sul rumore di fondo and presented a lecture on Systems of clouds, particles and ashes, migrating sounds. Also on the program were Iannis Xenakis' Polytopes, Analogique B, and La Légend d'Eer. more...

Eugene, 03-05 May 2008 — On May 3-5 2008, Carla Scaletti & Kurt Hebel have been invited by Jeffrey Stolet to the University of Oregon for a three-day event featuring music, workshops, individual coaching, and lectures. The events begin on Saturday night May 3 with a concert of live Kyma music by Carla Scaletti and Jeff Stolet's composition students. The concert will include the premieres of two new pieces by Scaletti: SlipStick (for Kyma and Continuum) and Cyclonic (for Kyma solo). On Sunday May 4, from 12-6 pm, Scaletti will present a 6 hour workshop on sound design for interactive performance. The workshop is open to the public; please contact Professor Stolet to make a reservation. On Monday, Scaletti will work with individual composition students during the morning and will present an afternoon lecture for Jeff Stolet's electronic music classes. more...

Paris, 01 May 2008 — Gerard Pape will be using Kyma as part of the new laptop orchestra he has started in Paris called CLSI (Circle for the Liberation of Sound and Image). CLSI is a collective of 8 composers who play only written scores and who interpret the works of their fellow composers. more...

Ashville, NC, 29 Apr 2008 — Lou Reed of Velvet Underground fame is currently touring the east coast of the US and he's brought Sarth Calhoun along to live-sample and process the band through Kyma. Sarth is involved in nearly every song, processing bass, guitar, vocals, and drums in turn. more...

San Jose, CA, 23 Apr 2008 — On Wednesday, April 23 in San Jose, this year's New Music South Bay concert featured music by Brian Belet, Jeff Stolet, and others. Belet's trombone quartet Refraction: Three Gestural Reflections was performed by the SJSU Trombone Quartet, and Stolet's Gongs of Tiny Insects was diffused through a multichannel playback system. Also on the program was Allen Strange's NGate and Belet's System of Shadows, both written for Stephen Ruppenthal performing on trumpet and flugelhorn processed through live electronics. more...

Sydney, 18 Apr 2008 — Garth Paine performed a new work for flute and Kyma and a new work for SynC with Michael Atherton (Waterphone and bowls) in the Aurora Festival at the Joan Sutherland Centre for Performing Arts on Friday 18 April.

From January 6-22 2008, Garth Paine was on tour in Köln, London, Leicester and Frankfurt. Paine performed live with Wiimote and Wacom tablet controlling Kyma and also led several workshops and seminars on musical interfaces. Paine's newest work is for Singing Bowls, Hand Bells, sensors and Capybara/Kyma system. For more information on this work and other work by his Synsonics project, see http://www.syncsonics.com/. more...

Lisbon, 17 Apr 2008 — Carlos Alberto Augusto took Kyma out of his studio for the first time to perform live for a new production of the 15th century German writer Johannes Van Saaz's "The Plowman from Bohemia" featuring the composer/musician as a third character. In February Augusto also used Kyma in a live improvisation with bowed instruments (violin, viola, cello. double bass, guitarviol) plus percussion at the Mascavado Festival at Lisbon's "Centro Cultural O Século". more...

Baton Rouge, 26 Mar 2008 — Stephen David Beck presented the world premiere of his new work for Wiimote and Kyma, A Little Light Saber Rattling on "Cinema for the Ears," a concert of experimental electronic and computer-generated music on March 26, at the Manship Theatre in downtown Baton Rouge. The performance was presented using the 27-channel surround sound system called ICAST and in "electroacoustic cabaret" style, with casual tables, open seating and friendly discussion. more...

Urbana, 07 Feb 2008 — In February 2008, John Ritz presented a Composers' Forum at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign discussing recent works using Kyma. As part of Ritz' residency, violinist Yao-Tzu Lu presented his DMA recital of music for violin and Kyma—including works by John Ritz, Steve Everett, and Brian Belet—at the Music Building Auditorium. more...

Berlin, Through Feb 2008 — Agostino Di Scipio is teaching in Berlin at the Elektronisches Studio of the Technische Univesitaet through February 2008 as this year's "Edgard Varése Guest Professor" where he is presenting seminars on his compositions with examples using Kyma and PD. more...

London, Press Release — Robert Jarvis has been shortlisted for the 'New Music Award' for his proposed new Kyma-powered sound installation for the London Wetland Centre. Entitled ECHOLOCATION, the piece will take the form of a responsive composition for a 'choir' of bat detectors that will pick up the ultrasonic calls of the bats that visit the reserve of an evening and transform them into a multichannel musical experience for visitors the following day.

The award seeks to recognise those who are pushing the boundaries of new music, and will eventually present its winner with £50,000 towards the creation and performance of a creatively adventurous new composition. The winner will be announced in April and the first performance of the new work will be in the summer of 2009. More details about the award itself, together with the other shortlisted candidates, can be found on the PRSF website at: http://www.prsfoundation.co.uk/newmusicaward/index.htm . more...

Rome, 23 Dec 2007 — Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi, Unidentified Sound Object, will be online Sunday, 23rd December 2007, for a live gig via the Mogulus Internet broadcast network. Starting 21:00 UTC time, you can enjoy a live video feed of USO performing live with Kyma and Ableton Live from Rome via either the USO Project blog or on the USO Mogulus Channel. Later rebroadcasts will also be available on the USO channel. Check for updates here: http://usoproject.blogspot.com/2007/11/uso-live-internet-broadcast.html more...

Bloomington, IN, 15 Dec 2007 — At Art Hospital in Bloomington, Indiana on December 15, 2007, audio artists/composers Silvia Matheus and John Dawson created a live improvisational dialog using Kyma, MAX/MSP running on a laptop and several controllers. As Matheus describes it, "The thrill of the performance is to keep the momentum going—the various sound textures have to transform continuously." Matheus and Dawson created sound textures with variable loops, pitch and time variation, live processing, and live panning/mixing. Some of Silvia's sounds were also sent to John Dawson's environment for further processing before being sent to multiple speakers. more...

's Hertogenbosch, 08 Dec 2007 — theatre production of Piet Arfeuille and de Wetten van Kepler.

sound design and live performance of the score by Frederik Van de Moortel - Sakuran more...

San Jose, 15 Nov 2007 — Brian Belet's work-in-progress for multiple trumpets and Kyma system was presented on Thursday, November 15, at 7:30 pm, at San Jose State University. Belet has been collaborating with trumpet virtuoso Stephen Ruppenthal on the work in which all computer sounds are generated in real-time using the trumpet as source material for processing, Stephen improvises with the computer sounds as they occur. Three movements (out of the projected 4 movement piece) were previewed in San Jose with the entire work scheduled for premiere in late January on a concert in Washington state. more...

Lüneburg, 21 Oct 2007 — After the first performance of Requiem for Soprano and Kyma at the Music Biennale Zagreb Festival, composer Zlatko Tanodi and soloist Lidija Horvat-Dunjko were invited to open the 33. Festival NEUE MUSIK LÜNEBURG 2007. The German premiere of Requiem is scheduled for the 21st of October 2007. Tanodi writes, “The idea of composing Requiem first came into my mind when I was working with Lidija Horvat Dunjko on the composition 'Anima – Animus ', also written for soprano and Kyma, and premiered at the 2001 Music Biennale Zagreb. Considering the fact that this is interactive music in which the female voice creates and controls musical parameters generated by an electronic device, the composition should have been entitled 'Requiem for a Woman Alone'. (according to Schaeffer's 'Symphonie pour un homme seul'). The piece begins with a composer's summary – a flashback made of quoted sections taken from other compositions which guide us through the time tunnel towards bright light. And this is the moment when the Mass for the Dead begins...” more...

St. Paul, 28-30 Sep 2007 — Zeitgeist performed Shape Shifting: Shades of Transformation at Studio Z in St. Paul, Minnesota (September 28-30, 2007) before taking the show on tour throughout the Czech Republic during October 2007. Shape Shifting: Shades of Transformation is a collaboration of Zeitgeist, composer Scott Miller, poet Philippe Costaglioli, and video-artist Ron Gregg to create an evening-length musical response to the nature and challenges of change. more...

Missoula, 21 Sep 2007 — Brian Belet was the featured guest composer for the Mountain Computer Music Festival at University of Montana on September 21 2007. Belet presented a lecture "Composing in 2007: Why do we do it? What does it mean?", an interactive installation Lobby Reforms, for unsuspecting audience, concert hall lobby, and Kyma processing (2006), (Disturbed) Radiance, for piano and Kyma processing (2003), and Still Harmless [BASS]ically, for electric bass and Kyma processing (2000), featuring the composer on electric bass. In Lobby Reforms, the pre-concert sounds of people passing through the lobby are transported into the concert hall (as well as back into the lobby) in an informal collage of social activity that differentiates the concert experience from the isolated activity of listening to music through headphones. The transition zone from the outside world to the inner container of the concert hall is an important time and place that physically and metaphorically defines the "before, during, and after" of the concert experience. The audio sources are processed in real-time and then directed back through the sound system to create a sonic environment that leads naturally into the concert itself as the lobby sounds eventually diminish as a result of the audience leaving that space for the concert hall. more...

Oporto, 20 Sep 2007 — Carlos Alberto Augusto's The Moment of Being for marimba, glockenspiel, Japanese woodblock, eTrack (produced entirely within Kyma), and the player's voice, was premiered September 20th at Casa da Musica in Oporto, Portugal as part of the Musica Viva Festival. Pedro Carneiro, the virtuoso Portuguese percussionist to whom the work is dedicated, performed the premiere. The entire program was performed again on October 13th at the French-Portuguese Cultural Center in Lisbon. The piece will be recorded and the concert will be videotaped for future release. The electronic track of The Moment of Being is based exclusively on the sounds of Carneiro's marimba; specially composed musical phrases, notes, and even the sound of the mallet handles were sampled and later processed in Kyma to produce the eTrack. more...

Ottawa, 12 Sep 2007 — Sculptor/dancer/acoustic artist Ken Emig's work deals with echoes and reflections, so when he and composer Edmund Eagan collaborated on a live performance for the opening of Emig's show at La Filature in Ottawa, they tried to express these same ideas using sound and movement. Eagan performed in one room (with light boxes) and Emig simultaneously performed in a video shooting space, a room featuring his dish sculpture and another room housing his cube sculpture. The spaces were sonically linked with Eagan using Kyma, the Continuum, a Mbiraski, Logic to process a microphone-feed from Emig's room, creating echo loops using delay lines and using the two different spaces as resonance before sending the resulting mix back into Emig's room. The audience was free to migrate through the gallery during the performance. Emig danced in front of a dual projection / dual camera video feedback setup creating multiple echoes of him on the wall, and a camera directly above Eagan captured his hands on the Continuum surface, projecting the image onto the same wall. This triple projection was then captured AGAIN by another camera, which projected it into the room where Eagan was performing. A DVD is in the works. more...

Copenhagen, 30 Aug 2007 — Hector Bravo-Benard performed Styrotron (2007) live at the ICMC in Copenhagen at the end of August. Styrotron takes styrofoam, a packing material always shipped alongside computer equipment and usually discarded as trash, and reinterprets it as a musical instrument. Different pieces of styrofoam are excited with a violin bow, or rubbed against each other, producing noises and pitched sounds with a rich spectrum that are only partially controllable, and whose behavior is predictable only from a rather general point of view. Using a constructed noise instrument such as this one, without any real history, also makes it possible to eliminate the connotations that are usually associated with traditional musical instruments, in order to be able to focus more freely on the exploration of sound itself. The acoustic sounds produced by the styrofoam are taken as the only sound source, and they also generate most of the control signals used as these sounds get transformed in real time through a processing network implemented in Kyma. The performer controls only the transitional points and some simple processing parameters through the use of a pedal. The large-scale structure of the pieces is clearly defined, but many of the smaller details are left open, as a result of the chaotic nature of the sound source itself. more...

Nedde, Limoges, 14 Jul - 04 Nov 2007 — Kyma user, Robert Jarvis, will be taking his Capybara to The City of Insects at the beginning of July for a two-week residency. During his stay he will delve into the world of insect song and other entomological sounds and create a surround sound composition inspired by recordings that he makes in the local area.

Imagine a room full of butterflies… Imagine living in a beehive or an ants’ nest… Imagine going for a ride on a back of a dragonfly… what would that sound like? Robert’s new work allows the listener access to this unique sound world and to imagine life through the ears of an insect.

The resulting surround sound installation will be featured at the museum for visitors to experience from July 15th through to November 4th, 2007. Follow Robert's investigations into all things creepy crawly at http://www.entomophonix.wordpress.com more...

New York, 2-4 Apr 2009 — The City University of New York put on the first New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival and Conference, April 2-4, 2009 at the Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, and at other locations in New York City. A program of concerts, papers, demonstrations and other events included works by several Kyma users including Fred Szymanski, Yuri Spitsyn, and Steve Everett. For a full schedule of events, see: http://www.nycemf.org/schedule.php. more...

Paris, 26 May 2005 — On Thursday 26 May 2005, Jean Philippe Calvin's Miserere Nobis was performed at the Eglise St. Etienne Du Mont at 30 Rue Descartes Paris 5e. The piece for large choir, children's choir, percussion and real-time electronics featured the composer as percussionist and Stefan Tiedje doing live electronics and was sponsored by CCMIX. more...

Donaueschinger, 16 Oct 2004 — In the premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Sonntag aus Licht on October 16th at the Donaueschinger Musiktage Festival, Kyma was used for live ring-modulation of the trumpet and flute. Stefan Tiedje of CCMIX programmed the Kyma Sounds and set up the Capybara at Stockhausen's studio in Kürten so he could work with it during the period of May to October of this year. In the opera, musical shapes are played in and out of phase with each other at increasing and decreasing time intervals: first for the Bassett horn with flute and then for tenor with trumpet. Both pairs meet occasionally at time zero. These temporal phase shifts are repeated at the microsound level through the use of ring modulation. For Stockhausen, the sum and difference tones of double ring modulation are like the reflections of a "magic mirror" generating new harmonies and tonal qualities. more...

Publications

20 Jul 2009 — Kyma/Pacarana is reviewed in the July 2009 issue of Future Music. A few of the more memorable quotes include:

...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. more...

15 Jul 2009 — Richard Wentk reviews Kyma running on the Pacarana in the May 2009 issue of Audio Media, concluding that working with Kyma makes you realize just "how unadventurous most of your experience with audio has been." Richard notes that "most audio engineering and sound design happen within a small creative space, and Kyma blows that space wide open." more...

10 Jul 2008 — An article on alternative music controllers published in the July 10, 2008 online version of the New York Times includes videos of Edmund Eagan and Carla Scaletti using the Continuum Fingerboard to control Kyma. more...

01 Jun 2008 — On pages 11-14 of the June 2008 of the SEAMUS newsletter, Camille Troillard discusses the past, present, and future directions of his OSCulator software. more...

01 Nov 2007 — Christiaan Gelauff is featured in the November 2007 of Interface Magazine in an interview with Allard Krijger exploring his CAG microsounds for Kyma. The interview, which left the interviewer "deeply impressed by the stuff Christiaan designs on this system," also includes a CD with audio and video demos. "Christiaan loads a few files in Kyma and explains how he created the filters and what the problems are in designing the filters. Mainly it is about advanced mathematics...Then he plays the result and I am astonished by the beautiful sound of the filters he has created." more...

13 Oct 2007 — Sound and The City was an innovative sound art project, conceived by the British Council and realised across China between 2005-2006. Seven leading UK sound artists—Brian Eno, David Toop, Peter Cusack, Clive Bell, Scanner, Kaffe Matthews and Robert Jarvis—were invited to create new work inspired by the civic sound environments that they found in four cities—Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, and Guangzhou. The artists’ experiences are documented in this book, along with essay contributions from UK and Chinese critics.

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 more...

18 Jun 2004 — There seems to be a watery theme to the May/June issue of Sound Editors Guild Magazine which features a photo of MPSE Best Sound Editing award-winner HamiltonSterling (Master and Commander) on page 30 and, starting on page 27, an in-depth interview with Finding Nemo sound designer Gary Rydstrom. more...

---

Eighth Nerve Archives