The Eighth Nerve

Echolocation

04-06 Sep 2008, Oxford -- As part of Oxford Contemporary Music's "Magic Hour" event in collaboration with the Oxford Botanical Garden, Kyma user and sound installation artist, Robert Jarvis, will be showing a new work that takes its material, as well as inspiration, from the many bats that visit the garden each evening. As the bats fly in, in search of food, they emit ultrasonic calls at a frequency above the human range of hearing. Jarvis's installation starts with these calls and processes them in Kyma to create a real-time musical composition for listeners to experience at the same time as viewing the bats. Robert has been developing the concept of this work for about a year now, and it was recently shortlisted for the 2008 New Music Award (http://www.prsfoundation.co.uk/newmusicaward/echolocation.htm). The performances at Oxford Botanical Garden will be the first time the work has been performed publicly. As well as the Echolocation installation, Robert has also created another piece in collaboration with students from the local St Barnabas' Primary School. This installation, entitled Predator takes its inspiration from the various insects introduced to the garden by the Botanical gardeners as part of their biological control programme. In a similar manner to how the biocontrol creatures are introduced as natural predators, so too this sound installation aims to introduce a form of audio-control for the public as darkness sets in. Multiple speakers hidden amongst the undergrowth will play short disturbing compositions designed to encourage listeners to move along and ultimately return home. To track the compositional progress of both the Echolocation and Predator installations, you can read Robert Jarvis's blog at http://themagichour.wordpress.com .

The Sound of the Burning Man

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

Electro-Music in Tennessee

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

Intersecting with the Outersection

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

The Cyber Erotic Wii Vacuum

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

Live at Zebulon

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

The Festival Inventionen

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

Jobin in Japan

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

Text to speech

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

Dettwiler and the House of BMW

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

Kyma X.54 Introduces SlipStick Synthesis

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

The Lucibel's Surveillence Cameras

25 Jul 2008 -- Exactly Where You Are, Lucibel Crater's disturbing new music video on pervasive self-surveillance, features Kyma processing throughout, most overtly and extensively in the bridge. The snippety-glitched-filtered vocals and the heartbeat bass drum are the result of Kyma manipulation, and several of the other loops were processed through Kyma as well.

The Screech of the T-Rex

24-27 Jul 2008 -- Hamilton Sterling used Kyma to create dinosaur vocalizations on a teaser for Land of the Lost, starring Will Ferrell, to be released in the summer of 2009. The teaser was unveiled at the July 2008 ComicCon in San Diego where Hamilton's T-rex scream was a big hit with the crowd.

The Batman's Sonar

18 Jul 2008 -- It seems that, just like a real bat, The Batman of The Dark Knight uses sound to visualize the world, and Hamilton Sterling is the man behind that sound. Sterling, who is listed in the credits as Additional Sound Designer but who also cut hours of sound FX for the film, was in the throes of editing when lead Sound Designer Richard King came into the studio and asked him for a temp sound to go with The Batman's sonar vision device before they sent it off to the picture department. Given fewer than two hours to come up with a unique sound for a crucial plot element, Sterling turned to a library of Kyma Sounds he had designed for his AI Opera (an ongoing composition project that he works on between film gigs). He found an appropriately swirly sonar-ific sound, cut it to the right length, added some additional processing in ProTools, and then he and King sent it off to the picture department. Everyone loved the sound and thus it survived to become the sound of The Batman's sonar vision in the final version of the film. Sterling's advice to fellow Kyma users? "Build your Kyma Sound library the same way you collect samples for your recorded sound effects library. You never know when you may be called upon to create a completely unique sound under a short deadline. If you've been slowly building your library, you can mine it for sources of inspiration under time pressure." By the way, if you see The Dark Knight in an iMax theatre "Prepare to be pummelled by the sound FX", Sterling adds gleefully.

The Drifting Lapsteel

10 Jul 2008 -- The calming, peaceful soundtrack for Richard Lainhart's abstract HD film, Drift is based on an improvisation for lapsteel guitar performed by Lainhart and processed through Kyma. For additional news on Richard's upcoming performances, see his website.

Lucibel Crater: The Family Album

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

Continuum meets Kyma

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

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

Mitterer meets Schubert

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

Tenori-on Meets Kyma

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

Costey and Black Holes

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

The Guitar Heroes?

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

OSCulator Embraces the Controller

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

Kyma in Interface

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

Sound and the City�The Anthology

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

The project also invited the Chinese general public to describe their favourite sounds of the cities that they live in. Those descriptions, along with audio recordings, are contained within the book and accompanying CDs. Many of those favourite sounds are ambient ones, less and less frequently heard as Chinese society changes at its current ferocious pace.

200 page book (English and Chinese) + 2 audio CDs, Edited by Yan Jun and Louise Gray. Published by Horizon Media in Beijing, China.

"Sound And The City might be termed an intimate art project. It speaks to the general public, not the selected public, instead of being proudly ahead of it�s time, it intervenes in the lives of the contemporary Chinese public; it encourages people to feel and share, rather than criticize or display miracles. The seven UK artists who made projects for Sound And The City have composed sounds in the most environmentally friendly ways. They invite us to listen again to our own cities and our lives. We have made this book because we want to share and listen with more people." � Yan Jun

Chadabe Wins 2007 SEAMUS Award

02 Apr 2007 -- Joel Chadabe was recently honored with the 2007 SEAMUS Award in recognition of his pioneering work in interactive composition and instrument design, his book Electric Sound, his advocacy for electronic music through the Electronic Music Foundation, and his work on raising awareness of environmental issues through sound art. Composer Kurt Stallmann interviewed Chadabe for the April issue of the SEAMUS newsletter where the two of them discuss models for new musical instruments, ranging from simple triggers to complex interactive systems: "These models suggest a fundamental questioning of what it means to compose and realize computer music. He [Chadabe] makes a clear distinction between the rendering model and the interactive model. The 'rendering' model uses technology to create an idealized performance of the composer's structured ideas. The interactive method defines a system of instrument behaviors associated with varied input from performers whereby the process of mutual engagement through performance forms the work. In line with systems developed to support this way of composing, he mentioned the visionary developers of the Kyma/Capybara system (Scaletti and Hebel) where real-time, open-ended responsiveness to live input was an initial design goal of this integrated digital system extending back to the late 1980's."

Mathematics & Music

09 March 2007 -- Matematica e Cultura 2007, published by Springer and edited by Michele Emmer, includes two chapters on mathematics and music written by Kyma users: Simple mapping e la dimensione estetica by Brian Evans (which addresses the connection between music, graphics, and number), and La metafora nella matematica e nel suono by Carla Scaletti (which equates the act of mathematical discovery with that of musical composition). Other topics in the book include infinity, architecture, soap bubbles, graphic novels, mathematicians and autism, front-back symmetry in pre-Incan Peruvian weaving, and many others. An English version of the text is to be published in October 2007. The Italian version can be ordered online from Springer (or from Amazon).

New aesthetics and practice in experimental electronic music

01 Apr 2007 -- Issue co-ordinator, Tony Myatt, is seeking articles on the work of Autechre, Taylor Deupree, Mark Fell, and others for a special issue of Organised Sound, titled "New aesthetics and practice in experimental electronic music."

Why is everyone so keen on Kyma?

01 Feb 2007 -- In the February 2007 issue of Future Music, Doug Kraul answers the question "Why is everyone so keen on Kyma?" (see page 102 of the magazine). A couple of excerpts from his extended response: "In my experience there isn't one product that provides the same facilities and workflow that Kyma delivers," and "Kyma is especially agile at analysing a sound and then letting you resynthesize it in ways that afford you a broad palette for making creative changes while you're performing, including 'morphing' one sound to another." Pick up a copy of FM at your local booksellers or newsstand to read his discussion of the advantages of using a dedicated sound computation engine.

15 Questions

31 Dec 2006 -- Richard Lainhart is featured in an interview by Tokafi, the online classical and experimental music magazine. The interview focuses on Richard's ongoing collaboration with his friend (and next door neighbor) Jordan Rudess.

Recombinant Media Labs

03 Oct 2006 -- Naut Humon's new Recombinant Media Labs (RML) facility is featured in the October issue of MIX magazine. Created as a bridge between cultural, commercial, and educational worlds, RML features a traditional recording studio, a video editing suite, a modular analog and software synthesizer chamber, and a large flexible black box theater with 16.8.2 surround sound, a 10-screen high definition video system capable of projecting panoramas of up to 360 degrees, and 32 transducers in the floor for that ultimate infra-bass experience. Reflecting Naut's long-standing interest in spatial audio, Recombinant Labs employs a hybrid of several techniques for sound spatialization, including vector-based panning, Ambisonics, and wavefield synthesis using clusters of speakers to pixelate a localized sonic 'image'. A fully-loaded Kyma system is on hand for artists in residence interested in doing customized synthesis, processing and spatializing. Naut's dreams for the facility include collaboration, creation and education: "We fully welcome�any organization or individual interested in the prospect of a creative collaboration." Check out the RML website and consider making a proposal to Naut at Recombinant Media Labs.