k y m a • t w e a k y — the kyma collective || view the current website || February 2015 Archive

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Symbolic Sound

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We were discussing an intriguing essay written by an illustrator. He talks about experiencing a visual object in three ways:

1. Imagined
2. Observed
3. Remembered

and he gives examples of drawings he made (for example, of what he imagined a lion to look like, a drawing he made from copying a photograph, and a drawing he did from memory).

We thought it would be an interesting exercise to imagine a "natural" sound and approximate it in Kyma. Then listen to an actual sample of that sound and try to imitate that. And then a week later to start from nothing and try to approximate the way you remember the sound.

1. I decided to try imagining (and remembering) what a single drop of water sounds like when it falls into water in a basin. I thought the curved sides of the basin would be "dispersive" and remembered our discussion with DavidMcClain on using AllPass filters to model sound propagating through a dispersive medium. So I used an impulse feeding into an AllPass filter.

It would be interesting if other people would like to try imagining/remembering water drop sounds and then creating them synthetically in Kyma.

1. ChrisPinkston observed the water by recorded the sound of water dripping into a glass of water.

To synthesize from observation, I took one of the drops and used it as the Response for a CrossFilter. (Does that qualify as synthesis? I think so, since you can use it to generate infinite patterns of drops that never existed in "real life")

In the illustrations it is often the imagined and remembered drawings that are the most interesting--almost becoming symbols for the object rather than direct drawings of a specific instance of the object.

-- CarlaScaletti - 28 Sep 2005