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FREE Psychedelic trance party this Saturday May 24 (same location as last weekend). Kyma Sounds by gragglasport at an undisclosed location in the general vicinity of New Jersey. (Bring camping gear and life support.)
On Thursday, May 29, William Meadows will be performing in Brent Fariss' composition Shining White Air for vibraphone, wind sextet, and live electronics in Austin, Texas. Meadows will be using Kyma to process the acoustical instruments, using resonators, ring modulators, granulators, and live sample capture and playback. The work will open a program which includes a performance of Pauline Oliveros's Four Meditations with the composer in attendance.
Yasushi Yoshida performs seated in the center of the audience and surrounded by live multichannel Kyma processing (giving new meaning to the term "surround sound"). For an overhead view of his setup (including a dual, multilevel foot switch control of his own design), see http://www.eonet.ne.jp/~channel-d/media/perform.JPG
Electronic Music Foundation (http://www.emf.org) is producing a series of concerts on June 3, 4 and 5 at the Chelsea Art Museum, W 22nd Street and 11th Avenue (http://www.arts-electric.org/specialpages/030515emf.html). Words & Music, on Tuesday, June 3 at 8 pm, features Chris Mann's Plato Songs, Kenneth Goldsmith's 73 Poems (performed by Joan La Barbara), and Joel Chadabe's Many Times Chris. Mann reads and Chadabe uses Kyma to electronically multiply and transform Mann's voice, sending it around the room, left, right, up, down, everywhere, creating a complex verbal and musical fabric.
http://www.apple.com/pro/music/devine/index3.html
A Kyma user who, for various reasons prefers to remain anonymous, will be generating the sounds for Reflected Moment Masher: a Psychedelic trance party under the gurgling cosmic splinter field this Saturday May 17. If you come, be prepared to camp, and bring along any necessities like food, water, (and electric generators?, ed). For driving directions, email gragglasport.
On Monday, May 19th at 7 pm, composer Tamami Tono will present a live concert performance in the offices of the Japan Society on East 47th Street in New York. Tono is the recipient of the second Siemens' "Artist-In-Residence" award and is working in the U.S. in conjunction with Yo Yo Ma's Silk Road program.
Claudio Lugo (http://www.rubicondor.it/lug.htm) provided interactively surround-processed sounds for A Stars' Collier for Cathy — a special production at Teatro Ariosto on Tuesday 13 May 2003 dedicated to Cathy Berberian and featuring pyrotechnic vocalist Cristina Zavalloni (http://www.cristinazavalloni.it). In several movements, each named for celebrated female performer, the piece featured special sound objects for each artist: diamonds in a tin box (Marilyn Monroe), kitchen set for eggs' recipe "à la Marlene" (Marlene Dietrich), hairbrush (Julliette Gréco), great archaic iron maracas (Maria Callas - Medea), great plastic paper white flower (Billie Holiday).
The 2003 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression—NIME-03 will be hosted by McGill University in Montreal from 22-24 May 2003. The conference will be a three day event including research papers, demos and performances presenting the state-of-the-art in new interfaces for musical expression. Joel Chadabe will be using a new performance interface of his own design to control Kyma in live performance on the 24th (Saturday). Also featured in concerts and installations are Yoichi Nagashima and Garth Paine. For more details see http://www.nime.org.
On Thursday 11th of September 2003 in Ealing (London), Modular2003 will feature presentations and installations by Kyma artists Garth Paine and Robert Jarvis (http://www.modular2003.com).
On Monday April 28 at 8 pm, Joel Chadabe's composition class at the Manhattan School of Music is putting on a concert of live electronic music using Kyma in Greenfield Hall. The Manhattan School of Music is located at the corner of Broadway and 122nd Street on the upper west side. (See directions at http://www.msmnyc.edu/about/directions/). The concert is free and open to the public.
For centuries, explorers have reported that crescent-shaped sand dunes can emit low sounds like that of a turbo-prop airplane (giving rise to a legend involving the ghost of a buried dinosaur). Apparently the best way to experience the effect is to climb to the top of a dune and then slide down the steep slip face (causing a small avalanche). A news item in the 4 April issue of Science (page 47), describes how a team headed by Stephane Douady was able to replicate this sound by slowly turning 72 kg of Moroccan sand in a 2 meter doughnut shaped container. Douady believes that this phenomenon can be explained by something called the Reynolds dilatency—a vibration created by the dilation and compression of air as grains separate and come together. (http://www.lorentz.leidenuniv.nl/~mvhecke/Workshop/granular_workshop.html).
For more links and sound recordings of "singing sand" see
http://www-personal.engin.umich.edu/~nori/booming_sand.html
http://www.desertusa.com/magjan98/dunes/jan_dune1.html
http://www.bigai.ne.jp/~miwa/sand/index.html
http://www.schweich.com/sbdA.html
Edmund Eagan is seeking submissions of Kyma sound art for a DVD-A compilation disk. Sound art, sound design, and all musical genres will be considered (http://www.twelfthroot.com/12_html/ra01.html). Each work will be presented in three formats: stereo, DTS encoded surround, and full 5 discrete 24/48kHz channels. Submissions have already started to come in, and the deadline is the end of next month, so it's the perfect time and incentive to finish off that project you've been working on and get it out for the world to hear!
With Spectrality, Disney animator Marcus Hobbs continues his use of Kyma to create microtonal melodies using ancient scales against a backdrop of acid techno beats. For more of Marcus' music visit http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/537/perfect_buzz.html
Lorenzo Brusci announces an MP3 version of a timet compilation called COMPILATIONE classicism meets the beat: an electronic tuscan scene now available on http://www.timet.org. (Kyma was used on two of the pieces). You may freely use this music under a EFF legal licence. To support the timet project, order their CDs!
On April 18, Chris Guest (of This is Spinal Tap fame) is set to release his new film, this one centered on the folk music groups of the early 60s. A Mighty Wind (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/AMightyWind-10002036/preview.php) is based on the premise of a memorial concert celebrating the life of a folk music promoter by reuniting some of his most famous acts (some of whom haven't performed together for 30 years). Sound designer Hamilton Sterling used Kyma to do a manually-controlled decode of the MS stereo production recordings that were made during the number of impromptu rehearsal scenes leading up to the final concert. This allowed him to cross-fade from stereo music to mono dialogue within a shot without a jarring change in perspective (helped along by some stereo backgrounds). Sterling also used Kyma to record all the crowds in quad and 5.0. For the backstage scenes, he played back the concert material through various sources and re-recorded it in the original dressing rooms and backstage areas for a you-are-there verisimilitude. Kyma was also used to create the rapid on-board car bys and car idle bys during the scenes of travelling through New York.
TransParrot, an Internet sound installation by Glen Sparer, is running all this week at the San Jose State University Art Studio Space. The installation consists of a bird cage with an iMac inside (where the iMac is receiving streaming images and audio of/from Glen's parrot in his home in Oakland, California). Next to the bird cage is a podium with Charles Darwin's book on human behavior (a lesser known and earlier work than Origin of Species). A microphone attached to the podium feeds into the Capybara Input 1 and the audio from the iMac in the bird cage (the parrot sounds) feeds into Capybara Input 2. The Capybara-processed output is played live in the studio space and also transmitted back to Glen's house via the Internet for his parrot to hear. The parrot occasionally decides to comment on the commotion, and this sound then comes back to SJSU and back into the Capybara. Gallery participants are invited to read any passages from the Darwin book at any time. Glen designed a 90-minute TimeLine for processing the two inputs. No birds were harmed during the production of this installation (the parrot declined to be interviewed). Sparer is a graduate student of Brian Belet at SJSU.
Lorenzo Brusci's CD set, Zarathustra, the last animal —timet2002, is reviewed by Ken Hollings in the April issue of The Wire #230 (http://www.thewire.co.uk/).
A concert to be held on May 9th at Centro Tempo Reale in Florence as part of the 14th Colloquium on Musical Informatics will feature a performance of Agostino Di Scipio's "Ecosistemico Audibile n.1" 2002 (solo live electronics) with Di Scipio and Alvise Vidolin at the controls. This piece explores the relationship between an acoustic space and feedback controlling the parameters of several Kyma Sounds (which are then fed back into that space).
On May 16th at the Conservatory of Naples Stravinski Hall at 19:00, Di Scipio's "6 studi dalla muta distesa delle cose" (1998) for piano + interactive signal processing will be performed by Ivano Morrone, piano.
Two Di Scipio tape pieces were included on an April 3rd concert at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago: "Paesaggio Scalare n.1 (Rome, Cantor Set)," 1998 and "Paesaggio Scalare n.2 (Berlin, bad sampling)," 2000.
An international festival of contemporary music in Croatia, the 22nd MUSIC BIENNALE ZAGREB (http://www.biennale-zagreb.hr), will take a place from 4-12 April 2003. According to the artistic director: The central point of the MBZ 2003 will be an extensive exhibition on SOUND and TECHNOLOGY, open-air performances given by various artists, workshops, play-rooms and toys (for everybody!), afternoon, evening and night concerts.... For this occasion, Zlatko Tanodi has written an interactive composition—mo-RE for string quartet and Kyma--which is scheduled for performance during the Electronic afternoon on the 8th of April.
Yasushi Yoshida (jazz guitarist) and Fumitaka Nakamura (University of Tokyo) are taking part in a concert called Imaginary Soundscape: Sound and music with digital technology on 5 April 2003 at 18:30. The venue for the concert is the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. For further information on how to get tickets or how to watch the concert streamed live over the Internet, visit http://iss.nc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/index-e.html
James Paul Sain is the organizer of the Twelfth Annual Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival (http://emu.music.ufl.edu/femf/fest12prg.html). This year's concerts include works by several Kyma artists including: Eclipse by Robert Scott Thompson, The Insectivora Honor Their Dead by Robert Dickow, Lyra by Brian Belet, Second Thoughts by Dennis Miller, TV Scherzo by Sung-Ho Hwang, Klangschatten III for percussion and tape by Seong-Joon Moon, Simple Matter by Lawrence Fritts, The Leaking Noise by Jeffrey Stolet, and Scattered Voices by James Paul Sain.
Dennis Miller's Vis á Vis is the winner of this year's New England Film and Video Festival Best Animation Award. His work was presented as part of the festival on March 27th at 7 p.m. at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, MA (http://www.bfvf.org/festival/
Warner Bros. Dreamcatcher opened in theatres March 21, 2003, but most of the buzz seems to be centered on the 9-minute animated "short" that will be paired with it. The Final Flight of Osiris, a fusion of CG animation and Japanese anime serves as a link between the Wachowski brothers' The Matrix and its much anticipated sequel The Matrix Reloaded (scheduled for May release). Included on the soundtrack is music by Ben Watkins and his Kyma-ite collaborator Greg Hunter (aka Juno Reactor). Listen for Kyma-generated granular feedback, vowel filters and surround effects courtesy of Greg and his transatlantic Capybara. (http://www.intothematrix.com).
Dennis Leas will present a demo of his Looper Construction Kit (http://www.greenteasoftware.com), a large collection of custom Kyma plug-ins for live looping, at Loopstock 2003 on April 5. Loopstock, an international gathering of looping aficionados, will be held Saturday and Sunday, April 5th and 6th at Chumash Auditorium, located upstairs in the Julian McPhee University Union on the campus of Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo, California U.S.A. In addition to several live performances, the event will provide an opportunity for looper software/hardware manufacturers to present their products. For an ongoing discussion of live, loop-based music, see http://www.loopersdelight.com/loop.html.
Brian Belet's Lyra for violin processed live through Kyma was performed in St. Paul Minnesota as part of the SCI-Region V Conference at Macalester College on Friday, March 7, at 1 pm, with Minneapolis violinist Zack Kline performing. Belet's (Disturbed) Radiance, for live piano processed through Kyma, was premiered in San Jose California on March 12 by pianist Janis Mercer.
Agostino Di Scipio's ESSAI DU VIDE. SCHWEIGEN (1993) for 2 digital tracks and Fred Szymanski's DUE REMIX (2001) were played on a concert at Galleria Toledo in Naples on 14 March 2003.
Some of the evil sounds designed by Mathis B. Nitschke (http://audionomio.de/) for the film Resident Evil are to be included on a new 7 CD set available from Hollywood Edge (release date: March 3, 2003). The Evil FX sound library includes such all-time favorites as: 59 KYMA ZOMBIES 1-10, 56 PROCESSED BEAST 1, 86 KYMA HELICOPTER, 88 KYMA SCANNER, 89 KYMA MONK STORM, 91 KYMA RADIO DEATH, and more. For details check out http://www.hollywoodedge.com.
Jonathan Sager got a credit for "additional sound design with Kyma" on John Wilson's second Pig in a Can album: You Can't Poison a Pig (Fedora FCD 8002). Sager also shot the photos used on the album. Described variously as "the future of Nu-Blues, Nu-Blooze, Techno-Blues, and Avant-pop," this collection of "De-mixes" pairs blues legend Harmonica Slim (http://iowablues.tripod.com/harmonicaslim.htm) with Meat Beat Manifesto's John Wilson on a journey through speech rhythms, blues, trip-hop beats and inside tips on how to kill a pig and which parts taste the best (the eyeballs). Each track begins with the voice of Harmonica Slim telling a story from his childhood on the farm or life on the road. Wilson picks up the rhythms of his speech, transforming it into an almost-rap. For a review of the first Pig in a Can album, see http://pulse.towerrecords.com/contentStory.asp?contentId=636.
Columbia University's Philosophy Hall is the venue for the Loops and Resonances concert, scheduled for Saturday March 8 at 6 pm. Joel Chadabe is using Kyma as the diffusion system for Jean-Claude Risset's Resonant Sound Space for surround-sound electronics. Also on the program is Philippe Manoury's 'En echo' with Juliana Snapper (soprano) and Miller Puckette (electronics).
"When Antonio Politano first invited me to write for recorder and electronics, in 1995," confesses Agostino Di Scipio, "I could hardly imagine that I would develop such a 'special interest' for such instrument(s). Curiously enough, my works for recorders and electronics seem to have attracted special attention these days." After its Lausanne premiere, DUE DI UNO (sopranino recorder, violin and Kyma) was played in Bologna (where the audience demanded an encore). An older work called THREE (1997), for voice (reading a short Gregory Corso poem), doublebass recorder and Kyma-generated tape will be played in Wien's EchoRaum on 8 March at 9:00 pm in a festival called "In Potenzia" (with vocalist Agnes Heiginger and recordist Angelica Castello). Also forthcoming are more performances of 4 VARIATIONS ON THE RHYTHM OF THE WIND (1995) for doublebass recorder and Kyma-generated tape: first in Naples (Fondazione Morra, on Sunday 2 March with Tommaso Rossi on recorder), then twice in Austria in Karnten (23 May) and Wien (Amman Studio, 24 May). The Austrian performances will be played by Angelica Castello featuring Susanna Boesch as a guest recordist (they will play 2 variations each). On the Bologna concert, Politano also played music written for his C-doublebass recorder and for his brand new (and huge) sub-doublebass recorder which has the same range as the string doublebass(!)
On Friday March 7, Carla Scaletti has been invited to present a 90 minute talk/demonstration on Kyma for music technology students followed by a discussion of careers in sound and music and a visit to the Arp 2600 mentioned in her online bio. The talk is part of the opening celebration for a new interdisciplinary College of Visual and Performing Arts at Texas Tech University (http://www.vpa.ttu.edu/).
Fred Szymanski (Laminar) was recently interviewed in the Italian e-zine ExibArt http://www.exibart.com/notizia.asp?IDNotizia=6646&IDCategoria=211 in connection with his participation in the ninth edition of the Sonic Acts festival in Paradiso and De Balie. The central theme of the festival is the fascination held by artists for the creative possibilities offered by giving musical form to light and space (http://www.sonicacts.com).
Claudio Lugo will be performing saxophone, mouth sounds, and other objects (like small stones in aluminum pans) with live Kyma processing and surround diffusion for the radical dance company PRIMA MATERIA's performance at the new Teatro del Lido di Ostia (Rome). ACTS-Sine Nomine is one of the first acts of the opening season for the new theatre and will run from February 28 through March 2, 2003 at 21.30.
Brian Belet will be performing live bass processed through Kyma on the NOW Music Festival in Pleasant Hill (San Francisco) California. His piece Still Harmless [BASS]ically will be on the first set starting at 7 pm, Saturday, February 22, 2003 (http://www.music.org/activities/reg/pc/pccurrnt.html)
David Mooney's work Perfect Grooming has been selected for performance at the 2003 SEAMUS conference at Arizona State University. The piece was extracted from a compositional matrix constructed with the Kyma timeline. The matrix consists of 30 minute layers of musical material that can shifted incrementally in either direction—structure remains constant while content changes. The beginning of each layer equals its end so that they can be looped. In this way compositions of any length can be extracted by choosing the starting point for each layer and recording/playing/performing for any desired length of time. For conference info, see (http://isa.hc.asu.edu/seamus/). For info on Mooney's matrix, see (http://www.city-net.com/~moko/aceg.html).
NEW WORLD RECORDS (http://www.newworldrecords.org) announces the release of Eric Chasalow's Left to His Own Devices (CATALOG # 80601-2), featuring seven of his electro-acoustic works. Two in particular, Left to His Own Devices and Suspicious Motives, pay homage to his Columbia-Princeton mentors; the former is built from vocal samples of Milton Babbitt and the sound of the RCA synthesizer while the latter incorporates two motives from Mario Davidovsky's music—primarily the opening to Synchronisms #6. Chasalow writes, "In spite of my long history with electronic music, the technology is not my focus." Of related interest: 80440-2 Eric Chasalow - Over the Edge.
Joel Chadabe used the CCMIX Kyma system to do a live realization of John Cage's Birdcage on Thursday night the 30th of January in Paris as part of an Hommage à John Cage at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain / 261 Boulevard Raspail / 75014 Paris. Starting at 8:30 pm and running until at least 11:30 pm, the evening included a selection of audio and video documents including sound installations and conversations with leading figures from the worlds of art and music, together with the texts of Cage's poems and recordings of him reading them. For more info, go to http://www.fondation.cartier.fr/, click on Ce qui arrive, then on Soirees Nomades, then scroll down to the picture of Cage. Birdcage is a live stochastically mixed collage of the sounds including birds in aviaries, recordings of Cage singing his 'Mureau' and ambient sounds. While working in the studio and listening to tapes of himself singing Mureau, he commented, "It makes the birds seem less ridiculous." The live mix is intended to be played back in a space in which, as Cage put it, "people are free to move and birds to fly" (http://www.emfmedia.org/catalog/em113/).
On Monday night (1/27/03) Chadabe did a performance of his Many Times David with cellist David Gibson processed live through Kyma at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York.
Robert Jarvis used Kyma on his latest project Europhonix which takes the form of a travelling installation underneath the sea between Calais and Folkestone. On February 19th, an audience of two hundred will travel on specially adapted Eurostar train carriages listening to atmospheric compositions created by Robert Jarvis in collaboration with students from three local secondary schools. The music will also be broadcast on the Eurostar radio station for all other passengers travelling that day. An article describing the event will appear in the Sunday Times that week and also the Times Educational Supplement. Originally, Jarvis had intended for the journey to be lights-out all the way, but one can just imagine the meeting of the safety and security committee reviewing that particular aspect of the proposal...
Cliff White used the mastering Sound posted to the Kyma Forum by David McClain as part of the mastering process on Deovolente's latest CD, Vision Quest (http://www.commiepinkorecords.com/musicframeset.html). Powerful and uncompromising in their lyrics, Deovolente's musical style could be described as a form of heavy metal, progressive rock, experimental electronic, new wave alternative rock.
Kyma can be heard in the vocal effects for Twilight, in the "devil dog" middle section of Goodwilling, and as the underlying basis for Hanged Man. In Looking you can hear Kyma coming in over the last part of the song and floating above it. In Metamorphosis, after the drums, bass, and guitar come in, there's a depth charge and a morphing into the water sound followed by another Kyma Sound dubbed "the parasite sound" by one of Cliff's colleagues and Kyma vocoding on one of the voices towards the end. Cliff recommends listening to the "parasite sound" over headphones, saying "it causes you to open your jaw real wide like you are clearing your ears." The last two songs, Circles and Providential, use the Kyma Sound called Watery Vox for vocal effects. Other electronic sounds on the album were generated using Propellerhead's Reason softsynth and guitar tracks with feedback.
Cliff has also been using Kyma in Deovolente's live performances, controlling it from an electronic bass drum (tempo calculations for amp mod), and a Behringer FCB1010 MIDI foot pedal controller for triggering samples and sounds for switching between songs in his compiled sound grid. The band is doing a lot of playing in the Austin, Texas area. Check their calendar at http://www.commiepinkorecords.com.
Brian Belet's Lyra for violin soloist processed live through Kyma is scheduled for performance on the National Conference of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) "Sum/Difference" conference to be held March 13-15, 2003 at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona (http://isa.hc.asu.edu/seamus/info.html).
At the Bologna, Conservatorio di Musica on 21 February, you can hear a performance of Agostino Di Scipio's DUE DI UNO for piccolo recorder (Antonio Politano) and violin (Haesung Choe) processed live through Kyma. (http://space.tin.it/musica/adiscipi/forthsounds.htm)
Composer and Kyma-user Diane Thome's album Bright Air/Brilliant Fire is reviewed in the current issue of Computer Music Journal (Winter 2002).
Lowell Pickett will be performing electric cello processed through Kyma in Unfashionable Music, an assortment of original music by Lenny Pickett scheduled for Friday January 31st in New York City (http://www.lotusarts.com/calendar.htm). It's part of the Warmer By the Stove Concert Series (featuring innovative music, intermedia, and free hot liquids) at Lotus Music & Dance / 109 W. 27th Street / 8th Floor / NYC. Lowell will be using Kyma for live processing and pre-programmed sounds on a piece featuring Lenny on the Lyricon (wind controller for voltage controlled analog synthesizer) and Lowell on 6 string electric cello. Other compositions feature Lenny playing woodwinds along with Leroy Clauden (drums), James Genus (bass), Will Holshouser (accordian) and Giancarlo Vulcano (guitar & banjo).
Peter Comley and Tawm Perkowski used Kyma for the sound design on the new XBox game, MechAssault (http://www.xbox.com/mechassault). As one might expect from an action game centered on 40-foot-tall robots, explosions are large and frequent. The game is a near-constant barrage of debris, dirt, and flames being cast about with extreme force. Most of these sounds were created with Foley and recorded sound elements. However, to convey the advanced technology behind the weapons found in the Battletech universe (and the sheer chaos of the explosions) Peter and Tom wanted lots of unusual synthetic elements...so naturally they turned to Kyma. Outrageous zaps, drones, and sub-bass sounds were integrated with the more traditional sound design and Foley elements to create some intense, cutting-edge audio effects that don't lose their impact even after being heard thousands of times. Filtering, pitch enveloping, granulation and waveshaping/distortion were key elements of the Kyma sounds which were used in processing field recordings and generating textures. Nearly every sound utilizes a carefully crafted low frequency element generated by Kyma to fill out the bottom end of explosions, building collapses and weapon-firing sounds. The game has been getting great reviews for the sound effects (e.g. from XBox Addict's Gamer Reviews: "This is mastered in Dolby 5.1 and it sounds like your right in the middle of the action. I use my surround system and it kicks freakin !&%$@#* like no tomorrow.")
SUPER SUCKER (from Purple Rose Films) opens in selected theaters this weekend January 24, 2003. Starring the "homemaker's little helper," a vacuum cleaner attachment whose voice was created by Joel Newport entirely in Kyma (with the help of a feather duster and a spinning bicycle wheel), the film was voted best comedy of the year by audiences at the HBO Comedy Film Festival in Aspen Colorado. Rumor has it that the Homemaker's Little Helper *may* be in the running for an Oscar nomination in the 'best supporting household appliance' category—the first time in the academy's history that this award would be awarded to a mechanical device. For more details on the cast, crew, story line and where you can see the movie, check out http://supersuckerthemovie.com.
Three compositions by Agostino Di Scipio will be performed by the Chamber Music Ensemble of Lausanne Conservatoire (Antonio Politano on recorder and Haesung Choe on violin) on the 4th of February 2003 at the Lausanne Conservatoire de Musique:
For a full schedule of Di Scipio's upcoming performances see http://space.tin.it/musica/adiscipi/forthsounds.htm.
Bob Dickow's recent almost-entirely-Kyma piece The Insectivora Honor Their Dead will be performed at the 12th Annual Florida Electronic Music Festival in Gainesville (April 3-5). The following week it will be performed at the Society of Composer's Region VIII meeting in Ellensburg, Washington (April 11-12). Dickow is an Associate Professor of Composition and Horn at the University of Idaho's Lionel Hampton School of Music where he uses Kyma both in his courses and in his home studio.
Jeff Stolet's extended media work for mezzo soprano, Yamaha Disklavier, computer-generated sound and computer animation (by media artist Ying Tan), Caminos Terrible, Desiertos Crueles (created using Kyma and Max) is scheduled for performance at the Florida 12th Annual Electroacoustic Music Festival in April and at the 2003 SEAMUS conference in Arizona. Previous presentations of excerpts from Caminos Terrible, Desiertos Crueles include presentations at the Boston Cyberarts Festival; D.art 99; dLux media arts, Sydney, Australia; Dream Centenary Computer Graphics Grand Prix, Aizu, Japan; transmediale 99 International Media Art Festival, Berlin; IV2001 Art Exhibition, Brunei Gallery, London; IV2001 Computer Animation Festival, London; C.P.U. Concert Series, Eugene, OR; Digital Arts Concerts Series, Bowling Green State University; New American Music Festival, Sacramento, CA; SIGGRAPH 2002; Digital Arts Concert Series, Bowling Green State College; Electronic Music Midwest, Kansas City, March; Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival, March, 2002; San Jose State University Electroacoustic Music Artist Concert Series; and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Computer Music Artist Concert Series.
Larry Fritts' Pre-images for bassoon and tape will be played at the SEAMUS conference March 13-15 2003 (http://isa.hc.asu.edu/seamus). The work features pre-recorded Kyma-processed sounds of a bassoon recorded in an anechoic chamber.
Fritts will also be presenting a paper at SEAMUS on the Iowa Musical Instrument Samples (MIS) database, now featuring 15 orchestral instruments recorded in an anechoic chamber as mono 16-bit AIFF files. These samples are freely available online at: http://theremin.music.uiowa.edu.
Read what the inventors of Kyma, SuperCollider, Max, cmusic, and Csound had to say in answer to the following questions:
In a special issue of Computer Music Journal entitled Language Inventors on the Future of Music Software (http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Computer-Music-Journal/), Carla Scaletti, Miller Puckette, David Zicarelli, James McCartney, Max Mathews, and Barry Vercoe talk about their work and speculate on what the future holds. The issue also includes a panel discussion transcribed from the Dartmouth Symposium on the Future of Computer Music Software organized by Eric Lyon.
The complete issue of Computer Music Journal is available at most bookstores (if not, ask them to special-order a copy of the Winter 2002 issue, Volume 26, Number 4 from MIT Press). Subscribers to CMJ can access the issue on line at http://rudolfo.ingentaselect.com/vl=9371171/cl=35/nw=1/rpsv/catchword/mitpress/01489267/v26n4/contp1-1.htm, and some libraries also have it available online at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/computer_music_journal/toc/cmj26.4.html.
L'Ultimo Animale, Sullo Zarathustra, Prima Parte, the new open-source composition by the Timet collective, will be featured on RAI Radio 3 just after midnight tonight in Italy (23:15 in Greenwich), and on the Internet at http://www.radio.rai.it/radio3/ on FONORAMA, Nicola Catalano's showcase for new electronic ultra-pop. Timet describes the CD as "metacomposed music...a territory made of musical elements in multiple relationships, providing words and construction prototypes that can be applied in thousands of analog free states" (Read more of Timet's Open Object manifesto at http://www.timet.org/main.html).
The Timet CDs Carne Capitata and Zarathustra are exquisitely packaged (the Zarathustra box looks as if it could have been carved out of marble and topped with frosted glass) and that same degree of attention to detail and aesthetics is manifest in the music inside. The performers, the engineering and the sound design (by Lorenzo Brusci) are both professional and subtle. They've also managed to meld disparate musical styles in a way that makes perfect musical sense. Not too surprisingly given the Timet manifesto, Zarathustra takes on an Ivesian-multiple-things-at-once quality at times but is always held together by the commonality of the speaking and singing voice. In fact, this veering in and out of disoriented and peaceful states makes the CD the perfect sound track for travelling through airports and train stations—highly recommended for personal headphone listening in stressful crowded situations.
The Leaky Noise of Skin that Falls by Jeffrey Stolet http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~fmo/stolet.html is scheduled for presentation at the upcoming Cycle de concerts de Musique par ordinateur series in Paris (St. Denis) on 23 January 2003. For more information on times and venues see http://margaux.ipt.univ-paris8.fr/~mmary/cycle.html.
The Computer Music Journal Sound Anthology, Volume 26, 2002, has just been issued and includes a live performance of Agostino Di Scipio's NATURA ALLO SPECCHIO, in which he uses Kyma both for functional iteration synthesis and the realtime processing of two percussions by means of granular time-stretching, with the time shift ratio and density dependant on aspects of the percussion performance. (http://mitpress.mit.edu/CMJ/discs)
Composer Steve Everett's Blow Back for trumpet and Kyma won First Prize in the 2002 International Trumpet Guild Composition Competition and was premiered at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England by FSU trumpet professor, Bryan Goff.
Other recent Everett performances and lectures include:
* In December 2002, performances and workshops on his interactive compositions using Kyma at INA-GRM Studio in Paris and at the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève (Switzerland) and the Conservatoire Populaire de Genève
* In Fall 2002, performance of music-video "Opaque Silhouette" at ICMC2002 in Sweden
* In Fall 2001, performance of a music-video "Opaque Silhouette" at the CIRCUS Art and Technology Conference at the University of Glasgow.
In October 2003, Everett has been invited to give a two-day workshop and masterclass on his interactive compositions using Kyma at Le Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris.
For more info, see http://www.emory.edu/MUSIC/COMPUTER/Steven_Everett.html.
2002
Joel Chadabe's composition classes at Manhattan School of Music and New York University presented end of semester concerts in New York City: The MSM concert, featuring all interactive Kyma pieces, was last week, and the NYU concert was on December 18 at NYU, and included a Kyma piece by Greg Rippen entitled Deaf, Dumb, and Blind.
Oded Streigold, physiotherapy student, musician, and former computer programmer living in Haifa, Israel has just released a new album called flat. Two tracks, 'Breathing' and 'Untitled,' use Kyma to generate synthesized sounds based on the pitch and amplitude of a vocal input. You can hear the utterly bleak (he says it's the saddest song on the album) 'Breathing' on his website http://www.sadglad.com. The web site also contains a beta version of his Super-Eel, the free VST plugin he wrote.
Kelly Fitz and Lippold Haken's paper "On the Use of Time-Frequency Reassignment in Additive Sound Modelling" has just appeared in The Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. In it, they discuss their approach to getting around the temporal smearing problem inherent in spectral analysis. In addition to using their Loris Class Library, Fitz and Haken used Kyma to resynthesize some of the results in real time under the control of Haken's Continuum keyboard.
L'Associazione Nuove Forme Sonore featured Walter Prati's Opus Orchestra in concert on Saturday 14 December at Sala Casella on Piazzale della Marina, 24 in Rome. Opus Orchestra is an ensemble of composer/performers formed under the artistic direction of Walter Prati in 2002 for the purpose of exploring unconventional sounds, using electronic instruments, making music together, collective research, confronting issues in musical aesthetics and improvisation. Their first performance was 6 months ago in Barcelona as part of the the Festival of Experimental Music sponsored by the Mir Foundation.
Interested in the idea of mapping data to sound? Check out the Sonification Lab website at Georgia Tech (http://sonify.psych.gatech.edu). You can read about research projects, check out the sonification tools they've developed, or apply for graduate school! There are research assistantships available, and students can enroll for the PhD in Psychology, PhD in Computer Science, or the Masters in Human-Computer Interaction.
If an array of detectors in the ocean pick up the signal from a distant sonar ping, the signal will be smeared out by propagation delays and each detector will receive a slightly different signal. Since the high frequencies arrive first, followed by the mid and low frequencies, the result is a kind of chirp or downwards glissando. Mathias Fink at the University of Paris VII realized that if you took these chirp signals recorded at all the detectors, played through them backwards and amplified, you could generate signals that would converge at the original source, but all in the same phase at the same time and amplified. Such a technique could have potential medical applications in focusing ultrasound energy to, for example, break up kidney stones without damaging surrounding tissue. For details, see page 1355 of Science Vol 298 15 November 2002 (http://www.sciencemag.org)
Narc, a brutal story of undercover narcotics cops and the relativity of truth choreographed to avant-garde musical score, will be opening in theaters December 17 (http://www.narcmovie.com). Cliff Martinez composed the score assisted by Tobias Enhus who created the musical atmospheres. Tobias used Kyma and CSound to create every sound in the score by processing struck-metal source material: turbines, metal sheets, steel drums, and even the suspended back end of a fork lift. Starting from these nonharmonic sources, Tobias used the spectrum editor and tuned filter banks to create atmospheres that match the key of the Martinez's musical score. He also used the Kyma timeline to do the surround scoring. The film, premiered at Sundance and picked up by Paramount for wider distribution, is striking audiences in a particularly haunting way, with many reviewers giving special mention to the effectiveness of the sounds and the score. For an early review ("The film literally rattled me for hours after the screening, the imagery and sound hanging with me for days"), see http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=6186.
Greg Hunter (http://www.melt2000.com/artists/hunter_intro.html), former member of The Orb whose most recent credits include the score for Mark of Kri (http://www.ps2.digitalfan.com/reviews/review54/) and remixes for DJ Xavier Morel, will be using Kyma on several upcoming gigs in Tokyo featuring music from his soon-to-be-released solo album. Dates include:
December 13th live gig at Aoyoma cay 11pm -6am
December 14th DJ at Liquid rooms 11pm - 6am
December 22nd live gig at Roppongi Think Zone (not confirmed)
Greg will also be doing a live show with Yasushi Yoshida in Kyoto (see below).
Music tells us who we are and it can change us ... To me, the most powerful music moves me to a new understanding, it's something that I could not imagine. — pd
Paul Doornbusch creates extraordinary and unusual sounds for instruments, computers, and electronics in his new album Corrosion, released on Joel Chadabe's EMF Media label. In "Continuity 3" for percussion and computer, for example, a china cymbal, a circular metal plate, and a tam-tam are transformed electronically into decisive gestures of sound that seem to float in a musical space, or swing through it like powerful birds of sound, or explode spontaneously. In "Continuity 2" for recorder quartet and electronics, the sounds of a recorder are translated into thin, floating strands of sound, articulated by sudden movements. Each composition has its own distinct drama. The CD also includes "act5" for bassoon and electronics; "g4", electronic sounds; and "strepidus somnus" for voices and electronics. You can order the album from CDEMusic at http://www.cdemusic.org/artists/doornbusch.html.
Yasuski + Greg do the shopping mall
On December 20th in Kyoto at Shinpu-kan, Yasushi Yoshida (Yasuski) and Greg Hunter will be teaming up with live video artist Yuko Shimazaki as Kesaran & Pasaran to create 6.5 hours of live ambient atmospheres sure to calm the spirits of last minute Christmas shoppers and audience members alike. For more information (including a map), see the online flyer at:
http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~yaski99/upComingEvents/flyer1220Front.jpg
http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~yaski99/upComingEvents/flyer1220Back.jpg
Yasuski and Greg will be using Kyma for live capturing, looping, chopping, filtering, distortion, etc of both acoustic and electronically generated sounds. This will also be the debut performance for Yasuski's elegant new foot switch array. For an overhead view of what the stage is going to look like (including a soldering iron at the upper left!), see http://ns05.iamas.ac.jp/~yaski99/equipment/pictures/newSetOver01.JPG. And for a closer look at the switches, see http://ns05.iamas.ac.jp/~yaski99/equipment/pictures/newSetSide.JPG.
Tobias Enhus presented a guest lecture at the Berklee School of Music on "Using Kyma and CSound for Film" on November 27. Despite the fact that it was the day before Thanksgiving, Enhus drew an overflow crowd in the large auditorium at Berklee. As an alumnus of the school, working in Hollywood using the tools he learned about in Richard Boulanger's synthesis courses at Berklee, his advice held a particular validity for current Berklee students as he gave them the inside info on surround sound, the sometimes capricious but always final word of the director, and the importance of learning the fundamentals of sound synthesis in Kyma and CSound—fundamentals that can then be applied in any context, on any piece of equipment, in any software utility.
Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratories are investigating the use of sound waves to do heating and cooling. A sound wave consists of oscillations in pressure, temperature, and displacement. Although the temperature oscillations are small, research during the past two decades suggests that this "thermoacoustic" effect can be harnessed to produce powerful, reasonably efficient heat engines, including heat pumps, and refrigerators. Thermoacoustic engines need now moving parts (except for a loudspeaker) and no sliding seals. Thus, these engines have the potential to be both simple and reliable. See http://www.er.doe.gov/feature_articles_2001/June/Decades/25.html for a photo and further links.
In memory of the imaginative and lively composer Salvatore Martirano (http://www.symbolicsound.com/eighth-memoriam.html), the 2003 Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Award is open to any composer, regardless of age or nationality and features a cash award of $1000 plus a performance by the University of Illinois New Music Ensemble in September of 2003. (http://www.voxnovus.com/information/Contests.htm#Martirano_Composition_Award)
Green Tea Software (http://www.green-teasoftware.com) has just released the Looper Construction Kit (LCK) as a plug-in for Kyma. The LCK is a collection of 50 new Kyma modules specifically designed for constructing live capture and looping patches. High-level models are included, and you can also design your own ideal looper by copying and modifying the supplied examples. See their website for details and examples.
Visit Sunao Inami's website, http://www.cavestudio.com, for news on his live Internet broadcast on December 1, 2002. Entitled "Pigmon Last Stand Gaiden" the broadcast featured Helmut Schafer (Austria), PheromonsterDISK (Osaka & Amagasaki), and Sunao Inami (Kobe). You can download a flyer from: http://www.cavestudio.org/cue/live_from_far_east/flyer/1201_ver9.jpg
Gerard Pape, director of CCMIX (http://www.ccmix.com), is presenting a series of concerts in Paris 2-5 December 2002 at the ADAC Auditorium Multimédia (http://www.adacparis.com/). The concerts feature several world premieres of music for live performers and electronics, all with 8 channel diffusion in the beautiful ADAC concert hall. For a complete listing of the program(s), see http://www.ccmix.com/news.shtml
Anyone who has ever tried to do show control from foot switches on stage can appreciate the dilemma faced by Yasushi Yoshida (aka "Yasuski"). When Yasuski performs live with Kyma, he's been using MIDI foot switches to trigger loop capture and playback, change parameter settings, and move between presets. But that ends up requiring a *lot* of foot switches, and the switches themselves can make a distracting amount of noise when you activate them during a performance. So Yasuski designed his own, three-dimensional photo-sensitive bank of foot switches (complete with blue LEDs to match his Capybara!) You can check out photos of his prototypes at his web site, or see it in action at an upcoming gig in Osaka featuring Yasuski, Greg Hunter, and live video-processing artist Yuko Shimazaki (details to be announced in the next Eighth Nerve)
http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~yaski99/equipment/pictures/newSystem04.JPG
http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~yaski99/equipment/pictures/newSystem03.JPG
http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~yaski99/equipment/pictures/newSystem02.JPG
http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~yaski99/equipment/pictures/newSystem01.JPG
Want to hear some mysterious unidentified sounds from under the sea? The Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) carries out interdisciplinary scientific investigations in oceanography and atmospheric science, focusing on open ocean observations in support of long-term monitoring and prediction of the ocean environment on time scales from hours to decades. Their Acoustic Monitoring Project has performed continuous monitoring of ocean noise since August, 1991 using autonomous, roving, underwater hydrophones. In the course of their acoustic surveys, they have come across some USOs (Unidentified Sonic Objects), and they have put both the sounds and their spectra up on the web for you to take a stab at identifying: http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/acoustics/sounds_mystery.html
Agostino Di Scipio has published a paper on his iterated nonlinear function synthesis technique in a special issue of the Journal of New Music Research. Di Scipio's article, "The Synthesis of Environmental Sound Textures by Iterated NonLinear Functions, and its Ecological Relevance to Perceptual Modeling" is in an issue dedicated to "Musical Implications of Digital Audio Effects" edited by Daniel Arfib (http://www.swets.nl/jnmr/vol31_2.html#discipio31.2)
Brian Belet will be performing Still Harmless [Bass]ically (for electric bass processed live through Kyma) as part of the Electronic Music Midwest Festival (http://www.electronicmusicmidwest.org/) in Romeoville, Illinois (near Chicago) December 5-7, 2002. One of the festival concerts is a special Salvatore Martirano Memorial that starts off with a short (and typically humorous) work entitled SATBehind, one of the earliest pieces of music created in Kyma. Other Kyma artists included on the festival include Larry Fritts and James Sain.
Robert Thompson's Pulse Field (http://cara.gsu.edu/pulsefield/ ) is an exploration of contemporary and historic approaches to sound art. In the School of Art & Design Galleries at Georgia State University, a spectrum of works by international artists will be featured in two sound art environments, a surround soundscape and an archive designed as a bibliotheque/café intended as a center to inform and educate the audience. Concurrent with the GSU show, the nonprofit artspace, Eyedrum Music and Art Gallery, will present L'Objet Sonore, an interactive display of sound art objects.
The heart of the project will be a three-week residency of the French sound art collective, Ouie Dire. Featured Kyma sound artists include Dennis Miller, Norbert L. Oldani, James Paul Sain, and Brian Belet.
Greg Hunter (http://www.melt2000.com/artists/hunter_intro.html) will be using Kyma for live berimbau processing Thursday night (21 November) from 8 pm to 1 am at Canalot Studio / 222 Kensal Road / London W10. Greg promises "a night of eastern tranquility and dusty beats" with all proceeds to be donated to WIMSA (http://www.san.org.za/) a grass roots organization set up and run by the San bushmen of southern Africa. How often do you get a chance to see Greg Hunter performing live, support a good cause, hear some live Kyma processing, and on top of all that get *free* mint tea and baclava as part of the deal? For more info, visit http://www.twisted.co.uk/ and click on "Live info" (Tickets are £5).
During the month of November, as part of the Wien Modern Festival in Vienna's TONart Gallery, you can experience a revolutionary development—a new form of art work created by composer Bruno Liberda called Pictophonics: Unresolved Mysterious Occurrences (or Mozart's last manuscript)... Traditionally, composers have presented their music in concert venues, the musical notation being seen only by the musicians who "implement" or "realize" the score. With "Pictophonics," Liberda has invented a new genre of artistic work-a synthesis of the audible and visible representations of music. Each audio piece is integrated with its own graphical score (etched on plexiglass cubes or on silvery blue computer-generated plates). Instead of presenting music as an ephemeral public event (concert), Liberda presents us with visual/audible objects—pieces of art that, like a painting, can be individually experienced in a gallery or even individually owned (like a limited edition print or a painting). At the gallery, you can listen and view over 50 such pieces (representing in total over three hours music—all of which was generated in Kyma!) For sounds, pictures, and interviews with the composer, visit http://kultur.orf.at//021106-9933/index.html
The Center for Research in Electro-Acoustic Music presents Electric Pacific, a concert of electro-acoustic music, Friday, November 22, 2003, 7:30 pm, in the Music Concert Hall on the San Jose State University campus (presented in conjunction with the SEAMUS annual Electro-Acoustic Music Month celebration). The concert features the premiere of Sonora #1, co-composed by Brian Belet and Daniel Wyman, for string trio and Kyma. Concert admission is $10, with tickets available at the door. Parking is available at the 7th Street Parking Garage on campus. For additional information, please contact: Brian Belet (mailto:bbelet@email.sjsu.edu) or tel: +1-408-924-4632. For directions to SJSU, see http://www.sjsu.edu/directions.html.
Garth Paine's Kyma+MAX powered interactive installation Gestation (http://www.activatedspace.com.au) is featured in the current issue of Leonardo (http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/whatsnew.html) and is part of a current exhibition in Florida entitled Design X (http://art.fsu.edu/designx/). Design X is the artistic component of a mini-conference on scientific visualization held at Florida State University in Tallahassee called Information Visualization // projects + designers + scientists. The purpose of the conference was to bring together researchers, practitioners, designers, and artists to discuss the enhancement of visual methods for disseminating and understanding information.
Blanche, a new film by Bernie Bonvoisin starring Lou Doillon, Gérard Depardieu, José Garcia, Antoine Decaunes, Carole Bouquet, and Jean Rochefort features some skin-crawling Kyma vocal treatments by Fred Attal (studio DIEZE). Set in the 17th century but with amusingly anachronistic use of slang and references to current global politics, the film opens with shocking scenes of a young girl, Blanche De Perronne, witnessing the savage murder of her parents by Captain KKK, the man in charge of the "Death Squads," a private militia of Cardinal Mazarin. Jump to fifteen years later and a grown up Blanche who is determined to avenge the death of her parents. She discovers two invaluable items that are highly coveted by his Eminence the Cardinal: a substance called "powder of the Devil" and a coded letter that only Bonange, a spy in the employ of Mazarin, is able to decipher. When Blanche finally gets her chance at hand-to-hand combat with Mazarin, Attal uses Kyma to create a chilling, dream-haunting, animalistic scream. In another powerful scene, Mazarin's voice betrays his true nature when, processed through Kyma, it becomes the voice of the devil. (http://www.commeaucinema.com/news.php3?nominfos=5346&cinenews=1)
Weltklang Electronic Music presents: Electronic Street Music and Moving Electronics at T-U-B-E (http://www.t-u-b-e.de) on December 5, 2002 at 20:00 in Munich. Weltklang (Richard Aicher & Andreas Merz) along with special guest Dieter Doepfer will be performing at the Max Weber Platz U-Bahn station in München, using a 26-channel sound system, Aibo robot dogs, a Doepfer Modular and "lots of crazy vocoder and grain-freezed sounds" produced by Merz's Kyma System. For more info, visit Weltklang's website http://www.weltklang-music.de.
Eric Chasalow's four instrument and tape piece, Suspicious Motives (produced with "the intelligent assistance of Kyma") had its New York premiere on November 7th by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. (http://www.chambermusicsociety.org/events/performance_detail.php?id=61). The work was performed as part of the Double Exposure series of contemporary music concerts in which you can hear each new work played twice, followed by a chat with the composers and performers over a glass of wine.
Italian metacomposer and sound-designer Lorenzo Brusci has launched a new website for the concept group TIMET (which he founded in 1993). The primary focus of the group is the development of nonlinear compositional techniques for interactive music and multimedia. Their "Open Objects" project is an environment for collective composition. The idea is that TIMET is making some compositional source material freely available on the web as an invitation to others to interact with them or to use and manipulate the sources — in other words to "co-compose" with the TIMET artists. Check out their beautifully designed web site and CDs of their music at http://www.timet.org.
Brusci will also be performing live with Kyma on November 29th in a duo with New Yorker David Shea at the Musicus Concentus in Florence. Shea and Brusci will present an electronic musical homage to the legacy of Italian neorealistic cinema (http://www.mega.it/musicus/emscsho.htm).
Understanding Virtual Reality: Interface, Application, and Design, a new book by William Sherman and Alan Craig published by Morgan Kaufmann, features a discussion of Kyma in the chapter called Aural Representation in VR:
For VR experience developers interested in creating very complex sounds in real time, hardware devices like the Capybara are an option. The Capybara is programmed using the Kyma language. Kyma is a general-purpose sound creation language. Kyma provides a visual programming language interface that allows a programmer to combine modules into a network that renders (in real time) a sound on a general-purpose audio engine (much like OpenGL produces commands to render on a graphics rendering engine). Because the samples are created in real time, any aspect of the sound can be controlled by any data stream...
You can order the book online through the publisher at http://www.elsevier.com/ or through Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/.
Kyma figures prominently in the soundscape for a current artists' exhibition in Ottawa, Canada. Visual artist Kevin Benson's 20 year retrospective "The Language of Colour" will be showing at the Gallery in Ottawa City Hall from 7 November 2002 to 5 January 2003. The soundscape accompanying the exhibition was composed by Edmund Eagan and features, as he puts it, several "Kyma-born sonic pleasantries." Check out Eagan's beautiful web site and get your creative juices flowing with your own personal oblique strategy of the day at http://www.twelfthroot.com/.
Number19 continues to "seduce your spinal column with it continuing electro-mantic ministrations." They've just finished a live show on the 8th of November, 2002 at the Galapagos Art Space assisted by Coco et Co and Tate (http://www.galapagosartspace.com). For more info Number 19 and upcoming shows, visit http://www.numbernineteen.net.
Arovane has just finished a new album, ve palor featuring lots of Kyma sounds and realtime effects. The release is on the Berlin-based label din (http://www.din-records.de)
A new book, Electroacoustic Music: Analytical Perspectives, edited by Thomas Licata (with a Foreword by Jean-Claude Risset) discusses works by Stockhausen, Xenakis, Koenig, Nono, Laske, Dashow Risset, Yuasa and includes chapters written by Otto Laske and Agostino Di Scipio. Laske's "Subscore Manipulation as a Tool for Composition and Sonic Design" is an analysis of his Laske: Terpsichore (1980), and Di Scipio's contribution is entitled "A Story of Emergence and Dissolution: Analytical Sketches of Jean-Claude Risset's Contours". (http://www.greenwood.com/books/BookDetail_pf.asp?pf=0&dept_id=1&sku=GM1420)
Paolo Schettini (Qubit) performed Kyma live and solo at the Metaverso Music Club in Rome (http://www.metaverso.com/) on Saturday 5 Oct 2002. Schettini and Luca Roberti are the founders of Surphase Studio http://www.surphase.it/, a group that works to promote electronic music and events.
Edmund Eagan has created a QuickTime movie excerpt from Arabesque, a new piece he is writing using the Continuum Fingerboard as a controller for his Kyma system: http://www.cerlsoundgroup.org/Continuum/Movies/
On Friday November 15, James Drage will be doing live Kyma processing on Eveline's Klang Quintet at the Polestar Music Gallery in Seattle (http://www.seattleimprovisedmusic.com/polestar.html). Eveline's Klang Quintet is actually a quartet for this show: Eveline Muller-Graf (metal percussion), Bob Rees (vibraphone, percussion), Stuart McLeod (vibraphone, electronics) and James Drage (Kyma). Eveline plays her self-built 'Boeing,' pots, bells, saws, and assorted metals. Bob and Stuart will add dueling vibraphones, and Stuart and James will process the sound electronically, sending the metallic drones and bell tones into a "swirling maelstrom of beauty and fury." Show starts at 8 PM, $6 Donation, All Ages.
Eugenio Giordani (known to Kyma users everywhere as the designer of the Euverb module) will be presenting a seminar entitled: "Il suono ricombinante": progettazione ed elaborazione audio digitale con la workstation Kyma" on November 13 in Rome. Giordani's seminar is part of a weeklong series of talks organized by CRM - Rome called: "Creazione musicale e macchine numeriche" Settimana di studi avanzati in Musica Informatica e Colloquio Internazionale taking place in Rome 11-16 November 2002 at the Goethe-Institut. For more information, visit the Centro Recerche Musicali website http://www.crm-music.org/.
On Thursday, October 24th 2002 Number 19 (http://www.numbernineteen.net/) did a live set at 66 Water Street in Brooklyn, New York, sharing the bill with Lure http://www.lurenyc.com/ and DJ Faraz. Featuring Leah Coloff on cello/vocals and Sarth Calhoun doing live Kyma processing and synthesis, N19 lists their resources as violin, viola, cello, voice, DRUMS (percussion), bass, keys, organ, piano, v-drums, g3 -> g4, synth, eyebrows, hair, skin, MOUTH, hands, but no saxophone. Their next live show will be on November 8 (go to their website and get onto their mailing list if you'd like to be notified of upcoming events and album releases).
prime secondo terzo accordo (2002), a film by Janusz Podrazik based on a poem and performance by Cristiana Moldi Ravenna is available for QuickTime viewing on the web at http://www.mracpublishing.com/video.html. The film is an outgrowth of the music Podrazik composed for the Ravenna text with voices, string quartet and Kyma processing.
Brian Belet will perform Still Harmless [BASS]ically (electric bass and Kyma) as part of the Third Practice Festival at the University of Richmond, Virginia on November 1. His composition Lyra for violin and Kyma will be performed twice in early November: at Southern Oregon University on November 7, and the Festival of New American Music at California State University, Sacramento on November 9. Belet also presented several Kyma related events in the UK in October. On October 16 his composition Lyra (violin and Kyma) was performed at De Montfort University in Leicester along with compositions by Carla Scaletti, Joel Chadabe, Robert Jarvis, and Agostino Di Scipio in a live Kyma concert organized by Garth Paine. Belet also presented seminars on his work at De Montfort University on October 18 and 23, and Dartington College of Arts in Totnes on October 22.
If you've ever enjoyed building with LEGO blocks, you might enjoy reading this sculptor's account of how he created a working harpsichord entirely out of standard LEGO parts (with the exception of the strings): http://www.henrylim.org/LEGOSculptures.html (My favorite part is how he used truck tires as the resting points for the plectra).
Fred Szymanski's Friction Sticky Rough, a sound and video installation for multiple video projections and loudspeakers was installed at the Diapason, Gallery for sound and intermedia in New York October 5, 12, 19 & 26. The sound-making procedures of nonstandard synthesis—iterative and nonlinear in nature—were the point of departure for the image-making techniques used in the installation. The sound component of the piece is based on functional sound synthesis which involves developing musical structures by manipulating interactions at the sound-particle level. In developing the image component, Szymanski set out to parallel this micro-compositional approach and to create a visual analog of the sound. The video consists of simulations of particle paths which provide a highly complex continuous medium for the transformation of nonlinear flow fields by means of particle-to-object interactions. (http://www.diapasongallery.com)
Scot Gresham-Lancaster used Kyma for some of the sound design on Calpurnia's Dream Obscured by Movement (http://apps.internet2.edu/html/calpurnia.html), part of the Internet2 Dance in the Digital Age event (http://apps.internet2.edu/html/fall2002-perfevent.html) Tuesday, October 29 2002. In conjunction with the Fall 2002 Internet2 Member Meeting, Internet2 presented a music and dance performance event featuring dance and music from around the US using low-latency interactive audio and video. Live performers on stage at the Bing Theater on the USC campus interacted with performers at remote locations in real-time before a live audience. The performance event was also netcast live.
Software and hardware developers from Symbolic Sound Corporation, Carla Scaletti and Kurt J. Hebel, will be presenting several lecture/demonstrations and concerts in the UK and France in early October 2002. They will also be demonstrating how a new controller — the Continuum Fingerboard, developed by Lippold Haken (http://www.cerlsoundgroup.org/Continuum/) — can be used to control Kyma synthesis and processing algorithms in live performance. Events include a full day workshop in London (Ealing), a lecture and concert in Keele (Stoke on Trent) and a lecture and concert at De Montfort University in Leicester. For full details, please see (http://www.symbolicsound.com/press-Europe2002.html). We look forward to having an opportunity to meet with you there!
Kyma-user Dick Robinson (proud owner of Capybara serial #1!) will be artist in residence at Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening Space in Kingston, NY, November 8-11. On November 9, 2002 there will be an afternoon lecture/demo on the history of the Atlanta Electronic Music Center (from 1963-2002) and an evening retrospective concert of Robinson's pieces from 1970 to 2002, including his most recent piece, Mokurai.
Lorenzo Brusci was one of the performers featured in the Ars Electronica KlangPark, September 8-9-10, 2002 in the Radiotopia Soirèe, September the 10th (http://www.aec.at/radiotopia/onsite/index.html). Radiotopia was a space "created out of radio waves and data bits as a global network of artistic communication — streams of sound, voice and music whose paths cross simultaneously at several locations, where they are remixed and continue their journey in the company of new traveling companions or mingle as virtual sound-tourists amidst the local soundscapes."
Brusci also cited Kyma in his dissertation on the philosophy of music, noting the aesthetic relevance of its treatment of sound multi-identities. Brusci writes, "Kyma is a real pre-condition in my — and not only my — actual sound conception."
Composer Dennis H. Miller was the guest composer for AUDIOVISION II, a concert of experimental sound & images on Monday, September 23, 2002 at 8 pm in the Merrill Ellis Intermedia Theatre / CEMI: Center for Experimental Music & Intermedia / College of Music / University of North Texas / Denton, Texas. Billed as "a special evening of computer music and animation" the concert featured works by guest composer Dennis H. Miller, along with works by Jeff Stolet/Ying Tan, Larry Fritts/Sue Hettmansperger/Walter Seaman, and Animusic (http://www.music.unt.edu/cemi).
A live recording of Agostino Di Scipio's "Natura allo specchio" (for 2 percussionists, tape, Kyma) will be included on the forthcoming Computer Music Journal annual CD.
Number 19 (Sarth Calhoun electronics, and Leah Coloff cello/vocals) will be performing Kyma-enhanced "groove music for the mind" this Thursday September 12, 2002 at 66 Water Street, Brooklyn, New York starting at 9:30 pm. Also performing: Astro-Cusion (drums, percussion, and multiplistic guitar) and w/o a net (drums and live looping guitar strings). Doors open at 7:30; for those on a tight budget or who like to their groove on right after work, show up early and get in free! Everyone else gets a free drink and a CD with the price of admission. More details, up to date info, and directions to the spot can be found at http://www.searchingeye.com/events.html.
Composer/trombonist Robert Jarvis will be using Kyma for real-time sound design on his latest touring project: Ambient Forces. Last June he recorded the other two musicians that make up his trio (Alan Niblock: Double Bass, and Roy Mitchell: Clarinets) in various locations in Northern Ireland chosen for their unique ambiences. These locations included Belfast's Titanic Slipway (where the big ship was built), Armagh Observatory's Troughton Dome, and fifty meters underground in the Marble Arch Caves. In a series of concerts planned for this autumn he will be using Kyma to reproduce those ambiences (as well as adding a few of his own!). Dates so far include: Downpatrick; Sept 12: Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast; Sept 13: Ardhowen Theatre, Enniskillen; Sept 14: Down Arts Centre; Sept 19: Market Place Theatre, Armagh; Oct 4: Castlereagh Visual Arts Festival, Belfast. More details can be found at http://www.ambientforces.co.uk/performances.html and also http://www.robertjarvis.co.uk.
Sound designer Joel Newport used Kyma to create the rollover sounds for Harvest Music and Sound Design's hypnotic and lava-lamp-evoking new website (http://www.harvestmusicandsound.com). To hear Joel's infamous Kyma-generated "Homemaker's Little Helper" sounds, click on Sound Design for Film and view the QuickTime excerpts from Jeff Daniel's film, SuperSucker. (http://www.supersuckerthemovie.com/index.html)
Laminar (Fred Szymanski) is one of the featured remix artists on Iannis Xenakis Persepolis Remixes Edition I. In the spirit of Xenakis, Laminar's contribution, Whorl, contrasts balanced static sections (generated using an analysis/resynthesis of the main body of Persopolis) with powerful dynamic sections, punctuated by deliciously crispy crackly Function Iterative Synthesis. Released under Naut Humon's Asphodel label, the two-disk set includes the original 55 minute work by Xenakis on the first disk followed by the remixes on a second disk. (http://www.asphodel.com/doc/news.whatsnew.html)
Several Kyma users will be presenting the results of their research at the upcoming ICMC in Göteborg Sweden, starting September 16:
Andreas Mahling: MusicTalk: A Tool Driven Approach to Computer Aided Composition
Paul Doornbusch: A Brief Survey of Mapping in Algorithmic Composition
Kelly Fitz, Lippold Haken, Susanne Lefvert, Mike O'Donnell: Sound Morphing using Loris and the Reassigned Bandwidth-Enhanced Additive Sound Model: Practice and Applications
In his installation Past Visible, Dorsey Dunn invites the visitor to confront sound without visual distraction. He maintains that, although we have become visually jaded, sound is still able to make a direct connection to the emotional centers of the brain. Participants put on headphones fitted with special visors to block out visual input. In the absence of visual distraction, each listener is forced to confront the full persuasive power of sound. For more details and a photo of the installation at the Soapbox Gallery in Los Angeles, visit http://www.itinerantstudio.com/2002/visible.html.
Phonons are quantized vibrations. They can range from low frequencies, such as sound, to very high frequencies (in the gigaHertz), such as heat. Matt Hauser and James Wolfe have some QuickTime animations to show how heat propagates on the surface of a superconductor (looking like explosions of sound!) (http://www.physics.uiuc.edu/People/Faculty/profiles/Wolfe/2movies.html)
KMLP i-radio/Locus Productions presented Vance Galloway Live on the Internet on Friday August 16, 2002 at 9pm PST at http://www.locusproductions.com/id215.htm. "Weaving a path between acoustic sound and digital processing, improvisation and composition, technician and musician Vance Galloway uses the guitar as his entryway into the world of avant-garde electronica."
To compare the brains of humans to those of chimpanzees and extinct hominids, researchers Dean Falk and Karl Zilles have developed a technique for "normalizing" the size of brain images obtained using MRIs. She and her colleagues were expecting to see large differences on the left side of the brain in the areas usually associated with language. Instead, they were surprised to see bulges on the right-hand surface of human brains in areas associated with music. Although initially surprised by this observation, Falk theorizes that early humans may have communicated more through tone of voice and timing than with verbal language. (Ed., or maybe music conveyed some kind of evolutionary advantage to our ancestors?). Lest we humans start to get a big head about our superior musical brains, she also discovered that this same spot behind the right temple is even larger in bonobo brains than it is in the brains of human beings. (http://www.fsu.edu/~unicomm/pages/releases/2002_05/release_2002_05_09a.html and http://www.hirn.uni-duesseldorf.de/)
Os Oris, a new work for trombone and Kyma by Agostino Di Scipio, will be premiered by Michele Lomuto (trombone) and Francesco Scagliola (live electronics) at the Warsaw Autumn Festival in September 2002: http://www.warsaw-autumn.art.pl/02/programme/21_1630.html. This is the latest in a series of works for tape (pre-recorded sounds) plus live Kyma processing, where the processing (typically granular, but not only) depends on features continuously extracted from the hall acoustics during the performance, via two microphones. In essence, the microphones are not sound sources but control-signal sources). The result is a kind of solo "live electronic" music.
Composer, Kyma-ite, and software developer Laurie Spiegel (MusicMouse) sent these links to info and photos of another of her favorite rodents: http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/accounts/hydrochaeris/h._hydrochaeris$narrative.html and http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/accounts/hydrochaeris/h._hydrochaeris$media.html.
Composer and Kyma user Robert S. Thompson is involved in organizing and curating Pulse Field, a Sound-Art Gallery Installation, Exhibition and Archive scheduled for January 13-February 28, 2003 at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. He invites all Kyma users to consider submitting works for possible inclusion in the show. The deadline for submission is October 15, 2002.
The Exhibition will feature explorations in sound from all over the world, irrespective of aesthetic direction, technical means or cultural context. Selected works will be featured in the exhibition and in a published CD-ROM catalog created to document the project and will also become permanent items in the Pulse Field archive. The catalog will feature biographical information on featured composers and artists together with artistic statements and other supplied data.
Appropriate genres may include, but are not limited to: electroacoustic music, acousmatic music, computer music, electronic music, ambient music, experimental music, experimental sound collage, articulated found sound, environmental sound, acoustic ecology, sound and video, sound and images, sound and sculpture, sound for installation. Composers and artists wishing to submit their work(s) must provide the following elements: biography and photo, recordings sound works on DAT, Compact Disc, Video, DVD and etc, program note(s), artistic statement(s) of the artist/composer of any length or form (paper, digital etc.)
They are seeking a broad representation of the finest sound-art in the world from all genres. There is no limitation as to the number of works submitted, duration of the works or year of creation. All submitted materials will become a permanent part of the Sound-Art archive and will be listed comprehensively in the catalog whether or not they are selected by the curators for inclusion in the Pulse Field exhibition.
Contact for submissions and information regarding submissions:
Pulse Field / c/o R. S. Thompson / Center for Audio Recording Arts - CARA / School of Music, Georgia State University / P.O. Box 4097 / Atlanta, GA 30303-4097 U.S.A. / Telephone: 404-651-1731 / Fax: 404-651-1583 / E-Mail: musrst@langate.gsu.edu
The New York Digital Salon (http://www.nydigitalsalon.com/) will celebrate its 10th anniversary with an exhibition of international new media art showcasing benchmark contemporary works and their historic influences as selected by a team of leading new media curators from around the world. The curators were asked to select new media works that have changed and are changing, the course of art and music history–from the earliest days to the present, with an eye to the future. One of the works that was selected was Gestation, the interactive Kyma-based sound and video installation by Garth Paine. (http://www.activatedspace.com.au/Installations/Gestation/Gestation.html)
Sunao Inami has released a new album with Masayuki Akamatsu and Kauya Ishigami called SPL-22001 on the electr-ohm label, featuring the three composers kneeling shrine-like before their laptops on the cover (http://cavestudio.com/electr-ohm/index_E.html). Living up to its billing as "massive DSP based experimental computer music," the album features about 20 minutes of each composer using Powerbook G4s with MAX/MSP, Kyma, and Reaktor to generate an amazing range of timbres. Inami's work emphasizes delicate, highly resonant filters just on the edge of breaking into oscillation punctuated with silences and crackling, sustained pads with resonant details popping in and out, and shimmering reverberated pads of sustained pitches along with with what sounds like a massively granulated train whistle. The sounds are imaginative and varied, sometimes (but not always) with a slow pulsing beat.
For a short history of sound recording check out the Virtual Museum of Electricity at http://www.ieee-virtual-museum.org/. It includes an amusing QuickTime "cartoon" explaining how sound used to be recorded directly onto film using a kind of light modulation technique.
Award-winning composer Tamami Tono's piece I/O has been selected for the ICMC 2002 (http://www.icmc2002.org/info.php). Tamami (http://www.iltono.com/ShoRoom/) will perform her composition on the Sho, an ancient reed instrument, using Yoichi Nagashima's specially designed breath controller to control live processing by Kyma (http://nagasm.suac.net/ASL/paper/icmc99.pdf).
Photos, Real Audio and MP3s of Sunao Inami's "Looper's Delight J 3rd Round" gig held on 14 July 2002 are now available at: http://www.cavestudio.com/LD_J/2002/reports.html.
Carla Scaletti and Kurt Hebel will be presenting Kyma lectures and workshops in Europe during October 2002. Tentative dates include:
Fri 04 Oct: Keele University lectures and concert
M-F 07-11 Oct: CCMIX lectures (CCMIX students only)
Sat 12 Oct: Advanced Topics at CCMIX (open to all Kyma users)
Mon 14 Oct: London College of Music & Media lecture & workshop
Wed 16 Oct: De Montfort University Master class & lectures
Claude Letessier created most of the underwater textures for the Universal Pictures movie Blue Crush (http://www.blue-crush.com/) using what he calls his "old rusty" Capybara-66. (Maybe it got rusty when he was recording on the beach in Maui?) Directed by John Stockwell, the movie examines what happens when a girl surfer enters an all-male surfing competition and falls for a pro quarterback from the mainland.
Doug Masla, creative director of One-O-Eight Music & Sound, has just completed the mastering and soundscape sound design for recording artist Jessie A. Cooper's CD 9-11-01, a tribute documenting the first four days following September 11, 2001. Masla was given a stereo mix on CD and asked to overdub as many as fourteen stereo channels of sound design and then to interleave it back into a stereo mix. He accomplished this by importing the CD, one track at a time, into his Pro Tools rig where he has Kyma on the first 4 AES I/O busses and an H4000 on channels 5 and 6. Most of the sounds used were chosen by reviewing 8 hours of video from 9/11 and extracting the audio from eyewitness accounts. The remaining sounds came from Masla's library.
During production, Kyma was used as what Masla describes as "the best real-time plugin in the world." As he describes it, "Kyma was used for real time re-synthesis, reverbs, and grain wave manipulation under Motor Mix control, making it possible to do vastly different adjustments on each pass."
After a final mix (matching FX and dialog with a stereo mix already containing voice-overs etc), the mix was re-imported into his computer and mastered using sonicWORX power bundle 2.5. Thus ended 3 weeks of 20-hour days and many heated artistic discussions (not to mention what Masla describes as "too much REDBULL and Earl Grey--but not mixed!"). The CD will be released July 15th on CSW Records (and Kyma was given a credit under Doug's name on the CD jacket).
Matthew Wood, supervising sound editor on Attack of the Clones (http://www.starwars.com/episode-ii/), is featured in the August issue of MacAddict magazine (http://www.macaddict.com/magazine/). In a QuickTime video interview included on the magazine CD, he describes how he got into using Macs and how computer games led him to a life of sound design. (Check out the equipment list for a mention of your favorite blue-eyed rodent!)
Nirto Karsten Fischer (http://www.forcedmedia.com) used Kyma for processing and synthesis on the new CD he has just completed with Paul Browse. Visions of Excess | Sensitive Disruption has been released in the US under ToneCasualties (http://www.tonecasualties.com). Kyma can be heard processing the voices of Robert Anton Wilson and Paul Browse and processing raw material for the evolving background pads. Kyma's granular synthesis is audible in the deconstruction of the groove at the end of the track Clockwork Universe. More information on the CD is available at http://www.minushabens.com/MHCD041.html.
Lorenzo Brusci is director of the Torre del Suono di Biel at the Swiss Expo 02 (July 1th-7th, August 1th-7th and August 25th-Sept 1st). He is also scheduled to perform at the tower on July 26th and 27th (and he is using Kyma in both contexts).
While he may spend most of his time considering the mathematical theory of spin glasses, recursive equations in quantum field theory, and the physical interpretation of Nelson stochastic mechanics, physicist Francesco Guerra is also interested in the structure of music and natural languages (http://romagtc.roma1.infn.it/perspages/guerra/home.html). Guerra (along with his colleagues Laura Tedeschini and Roberto D'Autilia) were some of the first people to use Kyma (they ordered a system in 1990). Professor Guerra's former students recently organized a symposium in his honor near Siena (http://romulus.phys.uniroma1.it/cgi-bin/FOTOcgi/foto.pl).
RobAcid (http://www.warehouse-club.de/Biographien/RobAcid.htm) is using Kyma to process and morph drum samples for an upcoming Native Instruments sample CD. The name of the CD is ELECTRONIC DRUMS, and his section is called the RobAcid-DrumKits.
Imagine a sci-fi movie with completely silent deep space battle scenes. That's what the writers of http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/ would like to see. They remind us that sound cannot be transmitted through a vacuum and that, even if the expanding cloud of gas from an explosion were to hit your ship, it would probably sound more like a windstorm than an explosion. The site provides "ratings" for several popular movies based on how well the laws of physics are preserved in the film. [But isn't art supposed to be artificial?]
Joel Chadabe invites Kyma users to send news of upcoming performances and other presentations to Arts Electric––his new worldwide calender for music and media events. (You can sign up for their email list too).
(http://www.arts-electric.com/) & (http://www.arts-electric.com/professionalinfo/)
Dorsey Dunn will be presenting two recorded compositions, Aphasia and Wadi, in a special un-visual installation at the Soapbox Gallery in Los Angeles during August 2002. This will be part of a larger group show, with painters and sculptors. Dorsey is using closed headphones with attached opaque visors to prevent people being distracted by all the visual clutter and to insist that they focus on the sound! Both pieces rely on Kyma for effects processing, sampling & resynthesis, audio scrambling and overall inspiration. The show runs from August 10-24, and the opening reception will be on August 10, 6-10 pm at the Soapbox Gallery, 701 Venice Blvd, Venice, California. (http://www.soapboxartgallery.com). In the fall, the show will be moving on to New York and Chicago (watch for future announcements).
uwe zahn (arovane) has just finished a new ep called cicliph on DIN Records/Berlin (http://www.din-records.de), scheduled for release in July/August 2002. On the track called "evlecc," zahn used Kyma for special compressed delay effects controlled live with his Motormix. The intro of the track "vraiil" is a Kyma sound, and some of the atmospheric background sounds were processed with Kyma. (http://www.arovane.de)
Check out the "Build a Personal Studio on Any Budget" article in the July 2002 issue of Electronic Musician magazine (http://emusician.com). On page 94, in a section on PC-based dream studios, EM Editor Dennis Miller writes:
Having the right tool for the job means having lots of tools. But one component I'm buying is so versatile that it saves me from purchasing dozens of different programs. That's the Kyma System from Symbolic Sound, and no high-end desktop studio should be without it.
The world premiere of tanner menard's from the mouth of his guru (sri-natha-vakrat) will be presented on July 11th at the LSU recital hall at 8 pm. sri-natha-vakrat is a sanskrit word found in Arthur Avalon's book Serpent Power. Avalon is the favorite author of tanner's own guru, Leo Womack, and this piece is a homage and goodbye present to him as tanner departs Baton Rouge for San Francisco. The source material for the work is Womack's answer to seven unrecorded questions. The answers were produced spontaneously but the questions were not. tanner chose the questions the way a painter might choose the position of a chair in a room or the direction of a person's head in relation to a window, as images in the soundscape of his perception of Leo. His voice proved to be a powerful vehicle of transformation and was used to control many of the sounds that set the stage for this work. Beginning in radical 1960's San Francisco and ending in a cosmic sea of signals and responses, from the mouth of his guru is the story of the heroic journey of a great being.
Lorenzo Brusci has just returned from a dance-theatre tour with the Raffaella Giordano/Sosta Palmizi dance company. Brusci composed the music, including several Kyma-produced sounds. In particular, Kyma was used in the elaboration of the Stabat Mater by Pergolesi. A European tour is next (watch for further details).
Kees Tazelaar's Kyma piece E pur si muove... has been selected for the upcoming International Computer Music Conference in Göteborg in September 2002 (http://www.icmc2002.org). Tazelaar developed a feedback ring modulation patch in Kyma that yields an amazing variety of timbres (to hear some examples, visit http://home.wanadoo.nl/tazelaar)
Other pieces selected for the ICMC include those by Kyma users Lawrence Fritts (Mappaemundi), Steve Everett (Opaque Silhouette), and Dennis Miller (Second Thoughts).
On April 14, 2002, The New Music Circle (a new music improvisation group now entering its 44th season) presented its St. Louis Showcase. The concert featured performances by St. Louis artists, including Van McElwee's Procession, an introspective meditation on parades. Procession is accompanied by an improvising duo featuring Rich O'Donnell on percussion processed through his Kyma/Capybara.
O'Donnell has developed a new way to play drums using a new type of sticks, new pedals, and a whole new technique of playing, that he calls SeeSaw Drumming, based on reciprocal motion. It allows him to play twice as fast as with normal technique. While speed is fun, it's the ability to create complex layers of polyrhythms that is the most important aspect of the new technique. As O'Donnell describes it, he no longer has to think in terms of downbeats and bars but rather in terms of convergence, overlays and cycles of the various layers. This technique can be fast and dense, but it can also be elegant and in the pocket.
O'Donnell is already working on another live processing piece, this one slated for the Nov. 1 opening of an exhibition of Bill Kohn's paintings of Brunelleschi's Duomo at the Elliot Smith Gallery. O'Donnell decided to use Medieval music to "seed my imaginative garden." Besides electronic sounds, a live group consisting of Baroque flute, lute, harpsichord, and percussion will be "thrust into the present" via Kyma processing.
Agostino Di Scipio has three upcoming performances of music for live performers processed through Kyma:
TEXTURE-MULTIPLE for 6 instruments and live processing to be played at the INVENTIONEN Festival in Berlin by Ensemble Mosaik, July 6th, Staatsbank, Berlin.
TIRESIA poetry reading + electronics to be performed at Reggio Emilia (Italy) by Giuliano Mesa and Agostino Di Scipio July 26th.
OS, ORIS (sketches of the air that is missing) new work for trombone and live processing to be played at the Warsaw Autumn Festival by Michele Lomuto and Francesco Scagliola Sept. 27th, Warsaw.
In an interview at http://www.dark-america.com/johnpaul.html, John Paul Jones describes Kyma as his "toy of noise" and talks a little about how he was one of the first to get a Kyma system (back in 1991).
Kees Tazelaar used Kyma to create a realization of a course in electronic music as it was originally given by Gottfried Michael Koenig in Bilthoven in 1964-65. The course consists of 28 exercises, and when they are all executed the result is a small composition. Kees liked the material so much that, in combination with his famous ringmod feedback sounds (see above), he created a large 20 minute tape piece called A Guide to Night Sounds. Sound examples will be appearing on his website soon (http://home.wanadoo.nl/tazelaar).
Sound designer Silvia Matheus presented the world premiere of a new work exploring the emotional breadth of human utterance at 8 pm on Thursday, June 20 at Venue 9, 252 Ninth Street (between Folsom & Howard), San Francisco. ELECTRIC WORDS: A Festival of Voice, Text, and Electronic Music featured thirteen composers whose work centers on text and the human voice — sung, spoken, sampled and manipulated — combined with real-time electronics. Hosts/curators Amy X Neuburg and Pamela Z chose a diverse group of well-known and emerging composer/performers, with works ranging from sound art to art-rock to improv, and featuring an assortment of unusual instruments. The festival presented three artists per night in different combinations, with different material at every performance and a number of collaborations. There were also informal on-stage conversations which gave each artist a chance to discuss his or her work. (http://www.sfemf.org/electricwords.html)
The June issue of Mix Magazine (http://www.mixonline.com) features Star Wars Episode II in the upper right corner of the cover (the usual sexy studio photo is the main front cover). On page 96 Ben Burtt reveals that the old electric razor in a bowl type sound design techniques are not as prevalent in Attack of the Clones than they were in the earlier Star Wars episodes. "I didn't record or create as many things that were relatively simple examples of what you can do at home in your kitchen! Much of what I made was complicated composites on the [Symbolic Sound] Kyma and on the [Sample Cell] keyboard — techno-based rather than the old tabletop of sound effects devices." [ed., unless, of course, you have a Kyma system in your kitchen...]
On Friday the 21st of June, composer/trombone-maestro/Kyma-enthusiast Robert Jarvis performed his new composition for jazz quartet and Kyma processed sounds. Entitled Spider, the piece is for improvising musicians and manipulated recordings of insects. Each section of the work is dedicated to a different insect (grasshoppers, cicadas, flies, wasps, butterflies, etc). There are eight sections (one for each leg of the spider). Jarvis uses Kyma to generate live background ambiences, for example a swarm of wasps that buzz in tune with whatever note he is playing on the trombone. Details: Friday 21 June at Het Hijgend Hert, Pasbaan 7 Breda (telephone + 31 076 - 5 141 988), and on Saturday 22 June at Jazzpodium DJS, Grotekerkplein 1 Dordrecht, (tel: 078 - 6 140 815). (http://www.robertjarvis.co.uk)
Fred Attal (DIEZE) used Kyma to do voice transformations for the character of Mazarin in a new film about Louis XIVth called Blanche. Patrice Grisolet is the supervising sound editor and Bernie Bonvoisin the director of the film currently being mixed at Luc Besson's Digital Factory. The film takes place in the 18th century with horse-drawn carriages as the leading edge technology, so Attal's job was to create sounds that were organic — they had to sound supernatural without sounding in any way electronic. Mazarin is a double-character, acting as the spiritual adviser to Louis the XIVth and also as the spirit of a devil worshipping sect. (Kyma was of course used for the demonic side of Mazarin's character).
On May 19th 2002, at the El Diablo Cuban Coffee House on Seattle's Queen Anne, James Drage (http://www.sil2k.org/artists.htm) used his Kyma system to do live processing of sound generated by musicians Eveline Muller-Graf, Stuart McLeod and Amy Denio. Eveline played her home-built instrument the 'Boeing' which is constructed of dangerous saw blades, kitchen utensils, parts of electric bells and parts of airplanes. Stuart McLeod played vibraphone, chimes, and percussion. Amy Denio (http://home.earthlink.net/~amydenio/index.html) played accordion and sang. All of these sources were processed with Kyma in real-time to create a quadraphonic soundscape. Some great moments include: four independent re-loopers picking up foot taps and accordion to create a marching army of accordions, swirling atmospheric four channel granular synthesis with realtime parametric control, waveshaper/resonator combos enhancing the rich harmonic content of the inputs, and spectral analysis and resynthesis to create a family of Amys. Keep an eye out for future processing relationships between Drage and local Seattle artists!
You can view excerpts of Curios — a video essay in progress with a surround sound score assembled from the video's synchronized audio at http://gashoagie.com/gas.html. Curios documents the pilgrimage of Jeremy Scidmore and Michael Bancroft (aka Gäshoagie) to the various odd venues known as "roadside attractions" that can be found near interstate highways throughout the United States.
The CCMIX (http://www.ccmix.com/news.htm) is offering a month-long course on electro-acoustic music in Paris during the month of July 2002. The 10th Annual Summer Course features lectures by Joel Chadabe, Agostino Di Scipio, Gerard Pape and Curtis Roads and as well as individual studio time. Please contact Randall Neal, Admissions Director, for further information: mailTo:obneal@vtlink.net
Joker Nies is performing live Kyma with a new trio: Voxxx - a voice-voyage (http://www.wollie-kaiser.de/timeghosthomepage/voxx.html). He will also be lecturing and performing at the Modular-2002 event in London in June (http://www.modular2002.com).
On May 25, 2002 in Venice, the Groggia Theatre presented the world premier of a new version of Primo giardino parlante, realized as passages of poetry read by actors Gianni De Luigi and musical interludes (for Kyma and string quartet) composed by Janusz Podrazik. The texts were drawn from Primo giardino parlante, published by Supernova in 1996 and organized into 3 sections:
The musical study was written specifically for this occasion by Janusz Podrazik. The performance was by Gianni De Luigi and the students of the Commedia dell'Arte del Teatro Stabile del Veneto La Comedìa. (http://www.mracpublishing.com)
While acoustic instruments have evolved into their current forms over centuries or even millennia, electronic instruments have been around for much less time and are still undergoing rapid evolution. When you insert a computer into the configuration, is it just a digital version of a traditional acoustic instrument? Or does it become something else entirely? Joel Chadabe promises to address these issues and more when he presents the "Closing Keynote" address for the International Conference on NEW INTERFACES FOR MUSICAL EXPRESSION (http://www.nime.org) May 24-26, 2002 at the Media Lab Europe in Dublin, Ireland. Addressing these same issues in nonverbal form will be Garth Paine's interactive installation Gestation in which participants create new audio life forms and interact with them as they grow. Both composers will be using Kyma in their performances.
Imagine the slow-motion unfolding of a dark flower in f# minor. That will give you some sense of b phenix's tomorrow lost yesterday, now available on an ORAC compilation (http://orac.vu/releases.html). To order a copy go to http://www.skimo.com/archives/2002/04-20-2002.cfm and do a find for "ORAC."
Joker Nies will present seminars and performances with Kyma as part of the London College of Music and Media (LCM2) Modular 2002 event to be held in London on the 27th and 28th of June 2002. The event celebrates the culture behind digital modular synthesizer and processing systems. It will include a day of intensive workshops and seminars and an evening concert featuring international performance artists. Systems under consideration will include Nord Modular, Csound, Max/Msp, Sync Modular, Reaktor, Modular 3, VAZ Modular, Buzz, CPS, Kyma, and Tassman. Entrance fee for the workshop and seminar events is £25.00 and entrance to the Modular Concert is £5 (free to Workshop/Seminar participants). For further details please contact: Per Villez mailto:per.villez@tvu.ac.uk or telephone 00 44 208 231 2543.
LEMS (Laboratorio Elettronico per la Musica Sperimentale) will present a live computer music concert on 7 June 2002 at the Auditorium Pedrotti in Pesaro Italy. The concert is the conclusion of the Tecnoarte2002 seminar series (http://space.tin.it/scuola/adamomi/tecnoarte02.htm) and will include Eugenio Giordani's Synkrònos"for piano and Kyma processor. (http://space.tin.it/scuola/adamomi/lemindex.htm)
Yuri Spitsin's b-i-r-d-r-e-a-m for Kyma system and theremin was performed on 16 May, 8:00 pm at the Theremin Center (http://www.dom.com.ru/main.shtml) as part of the altermedium.02 Festival: Well Tempered Noise. The Altermedium International Festival has taken place in Moscow since May 2001 as an outgrowth of the electroacoustic music programs produced by the Theremin Center.
The focus of the festival is on live interactive forms of computer music and multimedia--the intersection of sound, image and dance. "Well Tempered Noise" is a nod to the Russian and Italian Futurists of the beginning of the 20th Century and to the live interactive music of the beginning of the new millennium. The Festival is also dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the Theremin Center.
And while on the subject of Theremin, David Mooney's 24 part work Rhythmiconic Sections has been released by Arizona University Recordings (AUR). The work was inspired by Leon Theremin's rhythmicon, built in 1931 for Henry Cowell. Selections have been performed at festivals and concerts in the U.S., Belgium and Cuba (ICMC2001 listening room) and have been broadcast in North America and France. The work uses a mixture of synthesized sounds and samples, all of which were created and/or processed entirely within Kyma. The CD can be purchased online at EMF's CDemusic site <http://www.cdemusic.org/> (search for "mooney") or directly from AUR <http://www.aurec.com/classicallisting.html>. For historical background on the rhythmicon, technical info, and RealAudio samples, visit Mooney's web site <http://www.city-net.com/~moko/>.
Apparently, female chickadees judge the reproductive fitness of males by the quality of their singing, and, although chickadees mate for life, the females will sneak out of the nest for an extra-monogamous encounter with a particularly good singer according to an article in the May 3 issue of Science entitled "Female Eavesdropping on Male Song Contests in Songbirds." In a somewhat cruel-sounding experiment, researchers Daniel Mennill et al got male chickadees to enter into song contests with a simulated intruder (a recording of either a submissive or an aggressive male chickadee) during the height of the mating season. Then they did paternity tests on the offspring. They report that high-ranking males who lost two song contests with the simulated aggressive intruder also "lost paternity" in their nests. But the simulated losses of lower-ranking males did not affect their paternity one way or the other. The researchers concluded that female partners of high-ranking males are so used to hearing their mates win singing contests that it only took a couple of losses before they questioned their mates' fitness. (So...I guess if you plan to enter some kind of musical contest in the near future, it might be safest *not* to invite your partner along?)
Sounding Out, an international conference on sound design for film and radio, will take place July 11-13 in Staffordshire, UK (http://mcs.staffs.ac.uk/sound/conference.htm)
CCMIX, originally founded by Iannis Xenakis as Les Ateliers UPIC, offers a yearlong, two-semester intensive course in electronic music and composition. The course takes place at CCMIX studios in Alfortville (Paris), France and is arranged as class sessions plus private work in the studios. Classes will be taught by Gerard Pape (Director/composer, CCMIX); Carla Scaletti; Trevor Wishart; Curtis Roads; Jean-Claude Risset; Harry Halbreich; Julio Estrada; Alan Bancquart; Horaccio Vaggione; Luc Ferrari and Eliane Radigue. The course runs from October through May. CCMIX offers UPIC, Kyma and Pro-Tools oriented studios as well as varieties of other music software. Substantial tuition scholarships available. For further information contact: Randall Neal / Admissions Director / CCMIX / 10 Pierce Rd. / Barre, VT 05641 USA / +1-802-479-5535 mailto:obneal@vtlink.net
Ben Sims sent links to some Capybara images he's found:
http://www.rzu2u.com/jpg/capyb1.jpg http://www.rzu2u.com/jpg/capybara.jpg http://www.rebsig.com/capybara/lit.html#pcm
and from Brian Belet: http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/music_dance/admin/faculty/belet/capy.html
The graphics and sound designers at LucasFilm are renowned for their creation of complete virtual worlds populated by amusing (and sinister) creatures, and in this latest installment of the Star Wars epoch, they set a new benchmark for computer graphics and sound in film. From a city-covered planet (Manhattan extrapolated with shades of Blade Runner and Fifth Element), to an opulent water planet, to a Dune-like desert planet, to a clone-makers' planet of endless drenching rain (why didn't they install a space port or something so their visitors didn't have to get soaked every time they walked from the ship to the front door?); from epic battle scenes, to the subtly shape-shifting face of a hired assassin, to chimeric killer animals in gladiatorial combat, to the graceful momentum-modelling gait of the clone masters, you'll find yourself so mesmerized and impressed with the environments that you almost don't care whether there's a story or not. Thankfully the story flows familiarly straight out of the collective unconscious, a reassuring amalgam of mythic adventure, Lord of the Rings, Dune, and childhood memories of fairy tales (except the queen in this story is elected and has a two year term limit!). There's even a reference to "federation starships" (no, not the Enterprise) and an uncomfortably prescient invocation of emergency war powers by a powerful democratic leader, lending a post 9/11 uneasy reality to the on-screen violence and intrigue.
Actors Ewan McGregor and Christopher Lee stand out as the embodiment of good and evil respectively but the *real* stars of the show are the sound designers (Ben Burtt and Matt Wood) and the army of computer animators who've succeeded in creating the thoroughly immersive and believable environments (that are, technologically speaking, a quantum leap beyond those in Episode I). Sonically memorable moments include: the surprising and powerful sonic "depth charges" in the asteroid belt chase scene, the updated-sounding light sabers, insect-like creatures that have frog voices, the voice of a rickshaw driver on Tatooine and the voice of the creature from the "Techno Union" when he loses it for moment and has to retune his oscillator. Favorite musical moment: an obvious statement of the Darth Vader theme played just when Anakin shows his darker side caused me to chuckle but drew some angry glares from those seated near me (sorry!!) The tables were turned later on when everyone else was laughing at the antics of R2D2 and 3CPO, and this time I was the one who didn't get the joke.
As for the secret details of how the individuals sounds were created in Kyma, Matt Wood would reveal only that "Kyma was used to create ambiences and vocal processing." (To learn more, you have to agree to leave your mom as a slave on a desert planet and undergo "the training" at an undisclosed location near Nicasio, California.)
