Sequencing and Mixing

If you want to chain several sound generating or processing modules one after the other in a time sequence, you feed them into a Concatenation module. To hear several modules playing simultaneously, you feed them into a Mixer module.

Here's a sample (17k) (a digital recording) of Jeff Stolet counting to three. To hear the sample by itself without any processing, we select it and then tell Kyma to play just that much of the signal flow graph. (This sample happens to be stored in the Capybara's memory, but you can also play samples directly off the hard disk of your personal computer).

Next, we select the Oscillator icon to hear what that sounds like. This is a sine wave (17k) whose frequency is controlled by a ramp signal. (And it sounds a lot more like a sine wave when you listen to 16-bit samples at a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz and some decent speakers...but you get the idea.) The oscillator's parameter values are displayed in the bottom half of the editor. Notice that the Frequency is controlled by a function generator called "lin"--that's why you hear the frequency going from 200 up to 500 hertz. (You can use arithmetic expressions to scale or combine the effects of signals and MIDI event streams in a parameter field).

The next module multiplies Jeff's voice by the sine wave--an effect called "ring modulation" (17k).

If we select the Concatenation(60k), we hear Jeff's voice through three different processing modules in sequence: a filter, a delay, and finally the ring modulation. The inputs to a Concatenation are heard serially, one after another.

If we were to feed the delay module and the ring modulation module into a "Mixer" (26k) instead of a Concatenation, we would hear them playing simultaneously (rather than sequentially).