Shape the sound with your hands. Listen, tweak, twiddle, adjust, refine. Kyma lets you fine-tune your sounds interactively. It's like an analog synthesizer but with all the algorithmic capabilities of the computer and all the latest digital audio synthesis and processing techniques.
Kyma is a language of sound. It gives you the flexibility and power of software synthesis, but it's graphical, MIDI controllable, and real time. The programs you specify in the graphical interface control a DSP mainframe called the Capybara.
The Capybara is a black box full of Motorola 56002 digital signal processors (up to 8 of them in a single box). You program the DSPs by manipulating graphic modules on the screen of a Macintosh or Windows-based personal computer. The Capybara is transmutable hardware--a black box that transforms itself into whatever you need, whenever you need it.
Develop your own signature sounds and effects. Combine the modules provided in the Kyma library in unusual ways. Construct new combinations of synthesized, sampled, and processed sound together with live audio inputs and hard disk recordings. Get your hands on the sound and connect anything to anything else, any way you want.
Kyma was created for sound designers, engineers, producers, performers, computer musicians, composers, educators and researchers-for anyone who requires a fine degree of control over every aspect of sound and who has felt frustrated by the seemingly arbitrary limitations imposed by "hard-wired" software and hardware.
Kyma is not for everyone. If you are satisfied with choosing from among factory presets, then Kyma is not for you. But if you have an insatiable craving to get your hands on new and better ways to make unusual sounds, be careful. You may become a Kyma addict.
Design your sound by connecting modules chosen from a palette of prototypes, listening to the signal at any point along the signal flow path. Some of the synthesis and processing capabilities of the system include:
Perform your sound using MIDI controllers or the virtual control surface provided within Kyma. Or control it from MIDI files, text files, third-party sequencer and composing software, the scripting language provided within Kyma, or your own software.
A basic Kyma System includes the Kyma software and graphical programming language, a Capybara DSP mainframe with 2 Motorola 56002 66 MHz DSPs, 6 megabytes of sample RAM, 16-bit stereo oversampled A/D and D/A, and MIDI In/Out/Thru.
Up to 6 expansion cards, each providing an additional 56002 processor and 3 megabytes of sample RAM, can be plugged into a single system. Additional options include AES/EBU and S/PDIF digital I/O and sample RAM upgrades of 12 to 48 megabytes.
The software runs on Apple Macintosh computers with NuBus and on 386/486/Pentium computers with the ISA bus running Microsoft Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. The recommended host memory configuration is 16 megabytes of RAM.
Kyma comes with an extensive sound library, and, because it is software-based, this library is easily modified and extended by the user. With each software update, Symbolic Sound adds new synthesis and processing algorithms to the system library in response to customer requests.
Additionally, a third-party developer's program encourages the development of new software modules that can plug directly into Kyma's software framework. Contact Symbolic Sound for more information.
User support is provided through fax, electronic mail, a toll-free telephone line in the U.S., training workshops, and a newsletter reporting on the activities of Kyma users and new developments at Symbolic Sound.
To request additional information, contact:
