In recent months, composer Giuseppe Tamborrino has been using Kyma for a sonic exploration of feedback on recycled percussion instruments. When he started connecting these instruments to each other, he discovered a complex physical system that significantly increased their timbral capabilities.
Following the research of Agostino Di Scipio and his “acus-mate” concept — in which speakers become instruments — Tamborrino employed four Bluetooth 5.0 speakers as both instruments and drumsticks. This allowed him to send low-frequency sounds through a portable quadraphonic system in Kyma. Continue reading “Refractions on a complex system”
Carlos Alberto Augusto’s A Parábola (The Parable) is a cycle of pieces for instrument(s), a pre-recorded track, and the musician/actor’s spoken voice.
Augusto has produced four pieces of the cycle thus far: Akinesis for viola (2001); The Moment of Being (O momento de ser) for marimba, glockenspiel and small percussion (2007); A observação do Tempo (Observing Time) for snare drums (2023); and a new piece, for classical and baroque guitars, and small percussion, is about to premier.
Andrés Pérez performing performing Carlos Alberto Augusto’s A observação do Tempo
Composer/performer Anne La Berge was the featured artist for the 2025 SPLICE Institute — an annual Institute designed for performers and composers to study the integration of performance with electronics where she presented several performances, worked with student composers, and was invited to do an introductory session on how she uses Kyma in her work.
During the conference, she became a role model for students seeking artistic careers outside of academia.
Earlier in the summer, she was featured in the Cortona Sessions for New Music (20 July – 1 August, 2025 in Ede, Netherlands) — an educational program dedicated to the creation and performance of contemporary music, and a meeting place for emerging composers and performers seeking to collaborate, learn, grow, and create.
It’s a question at the top of everyone’s mind recently: When your current situation feels broken, should you stay and try to fix it? Or should you go somewhere else and start fresh?
Recently, Franz and Andrea were each (independently) recruited to join the faculty of a different university in another country. After much consideration, Franz chose to stay in his current position, and Andrea chose to travel halfway around the world to accept a new position. What factors entered into their decisions? In the interests of anonymity, let’s refer to the two options as the Stay option and the Go option.
“Light Time Delay” is a term-of-art used to express the comms delay between the earth and spacecraft. It’s also the stage name for Kyma artist Théa-Martine Gauthier’s live performance project, recently featured on Modular Seattle’s Modular Nights 13 April 2025, a free monthly event at the Substation venue in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood.
Opening with phasey delays and a rumbling sub, evocative of acceleration, the performance explodes into metallic rhythmic analog chirps paired with images evoking navigation, PC board layouts, and gravitational manifolds. Obsessively accelerating loops and fragments of texts close in on us in ever-accelerating spirals until the tension finally resolves into a watery, peaceful texture with floaty vocals, underlaid by ominous sub rumbling, electric frog creaks, and shimmery ringing filter chords over a deep thrumming fundamental, and concluding with a sense of wonder and reflection on the improbability of this experience we call “life”: Continue reading “Light Time Delay”
Composer/instrument designer, Chi Wang, was the featured guest artist at this year’s TURNUP Festival in Tucson Arizona on 21 March 2025.
After performing two of her compositions—Transparent Affordance and Fusion of Horizons — Professor Wang presented a public lecture about her work, including sound design demonstrations and live performance excerpts in Kyma.
Dr Wang’s graduate student Minho Kang also appeared on the festival program with The Mist, a fixed media piece where Kyma was used for sound design.
R U I S is one of several pieces that have emerged from Kuit’s years of research conducted with Kyma on the phenomenon of noise.
Part of a cycle interpreting our increasingly complex world of information, RUIS explores collisions, dialogs, interplay, patterns, spreading, merging — sometimes the noise is even pulled loose and spread into pulses in the twelve-meter-wide horizontal panorama, each tap shifting in space as an audio object.
A study in spaciousness and complexity, frequencies are stacked or moved through the space, sometimes configured in a static distribution, while at other times as pseudo-chaotic movements. Each loudspeaker can serve either as an autonomous sound object or as an intrinsic part of the whole.
Likewise, the listener can take a seat or move through the room, receiving continuously changing reflective angles of incidence at the ears.
In the live performance of Marthyia de Abdul Hamid, based on the words of Portuguese poet Alberto Pimenta, the composer recites the poem and his voice is processed through Kyma which generates live “sonic trimmings and toppings”.
Augusto uses a small Intech Studio controller and a Wacom tablet to control parameters of the sounds used in the production, and he uses the Kyma Control iPad app to trigger a Multigrid. He uses a DPA headset mic and two PZMs to capture his voice and use it to control some of the Kyma sounds.
The performance evokes the action of “sound writing”, in both a literal and metaphorical sense.
Augusto identifies the theme of the work as “a conflict that seems to have no end in sight.”
…there is something perennial in this Marthiya of Abdel Hamid, in this tragedy, in this permanent lesson that persists in remaining, most of the time, unlearned, and that keeps resisting. All of this gives more strength to my own resistance… The solution I have come to understand… is the concept of “in between”, formulated by my dear friend… António de Sousa Dias.
Within the sound palette… there are periods in which the sound background is “in between” the real pre-recorded sounds I use and my live voice. It is “in between” the music and the sound design. It is “in between” a real sound universe and another, totally artificial one. “In between” the audible-visible and the imagined-invisible. There are moments that remind us that we are all caught “in between” our ridiculous and reassuring daily lives and this conflict(s), with no end in sight, that has haunted us for too long, to which we pay only occasional attention…
The wiry underbelly of the setup (and one wireless Wi-Fi from iPad to Pacamara)
Tom Williams’Like the Sea Itself (2024) is a work for cello, fixed media and live Kyma electronics. Cellist Madeleine Shapiro will be performing the work at ICMC2025 Boston (where it was selected in a double blind review process) and at NYCEMF 2025.
Described as “a musical meditation on the elemental nature of the sea,” Williams developed the work in close collaboration with New York cellist Madeleine Shapiro and was deeply influenced by Alice Oswald’s poetry on the nature of water. As Oswald writes, “…the sea has endless beginnings.”
Composed over the autumn of 2024, Like the Sea Itself is comprised of two elements: recordings the composer made of the North Sea on the Suffolk coast and recordings of Shapiro improvising on these sea recordings in her apartment in Manhattan, New York.
Created using Kyma and the Pacamara, the fixed media portion is shaped by the energy and turbulence of both the cello recordings and the sea itself.
Like the Sea Itself can performed either as a fixed media sound composition or as a live free improvisation by the cellist to the fixed media sound composition.
