Architecture of Sound

RIETVELD PAVILION — Roland Emile Kuit’s new album published by Donemus — is now available on iTunes. The album was released in conjunction with the 9 July 2017 World Premiere at the sculpture park of the Kröller-Möller Museum in Otterlo in The Netherlands. With this work, Kuit makes a connection between sound and De STIJL’s ideas and architecture, using pure tones as spectral building blocks, stacking energies to build harmonic sound planes and placing them in space by dividing the spectrum and displaying it on a maze of speakers.

Photography: Henk Porck

Sonologist-composer Roland Emile Kuit balances on the interface between research, music and sound art, at a point he called “the new listening”. Using Kyma, Kuit warps time — influencing the present with events that will happen in the future and vice versa. He uses real-time analysis of the sound of acoustical instruments to create spectral compositions.

Kyma 7.12 Sound Design Software Update

New Sounds, help for learning Capytalk, plus handy new features in the Timeline, Multigrid and Virtual Control Surface

Kyma 7.12, the latest update to the world’s most advanced sound design software, is now available as a free download for the sound designers, musicians, and researchers using Kyma 7.

Kyma 7.12

Learning Capytalk — Who doesn’t want to improve their coding skills a little bit? Kyma 7.12 makes it easy to learn the Capytalk parameter-control language with the new Capytalk of the Day (CoD) feature. Each day, CoD introduces a single Capytalk message, along with documentation, coding examples, and links to Sounds that show how to use the message in parameter fields. The CoD provides gentle reminders of all those Capytalk features you may have forgotten about (along with some you may have missed along the way). If you’re new to Kyma, it’s a great way to learn a little bit of Capytalk each day; just think, by this time next year, you’ll know 365 Capytalk messages! CoD: it’s the perfect companion to the Sons du Jour!

New Sounds — Kyma is all about the sounds, and this update includes new Sounds, new Prototypes, and several improvements to existing Sounds, including a tuned van Der Pol Oscillator, a Tilt EQ, sample-cloud morphing on live-captured audio, and an easier-to-read, easier-to-modify vocal synthesis modal filter (See the Highlights below for additional details).

Live Performance — Several new features support live interactive sound design and musical performance including: a Timeline option that lets you substitute a recording for the live input (when you’re developing a piece that includes live acoustic performers); a Multigrid option to display subsets of controls on a secondary Virtual Control Surface (so you can split the controls among the laptop screen and your iPad), and a Tool for displaying your secondary VCS or the movie associated with a Timeline at full size on a second display.

 

Highlights of Kyma 7.12 include:

• The USO Tilt EQ is useful for gently tipping the spectral balance of the Input to emphasize the lows and de-emphasize the highs (or vice versa);

• TunedVanDerPolOscillator: The van der Pol oscillator is a model of a nonlinear vacuum tube oscillator developed by Dutch physicist Balthasar van der Pol at Philips in the 1920s. This version of the van der Pol oscillator is tuned and driven by an internal oscillator. When the Ratio of driver to the van der Pol’s natural frequency is set to 1, you can get frequencies that are stable. But you can also experiment with Ratios other than 1 and Driver waveforms other than Sine to get unusual distortion and modulation effects;

• MultiSampleCloud and Morph1DSampleCloud now have a fromMemoryWriter checkbox so you can use MemoryWriters to capture multiple streams of live audio input and live-switch or morph between them as sample clouds;

• ModalFilter Vocal Formants BPF and ModalFilter Vocal Formants KBD prototypes have had their parameter values reorganized in order to make it clearer how to change the formant frequencies and amplitudes;

• A new Timeline option to select a samples file as the input to a Track (which you can elect to read from RAM or from disk). This can be useful when developing a Timeline for live acoustic performers (since during development, you can use a recording of the live input rather than always having to generate the input live);

• A Timeline option to compress or expand durations of all selected Time bars and their associated automation;

• A new sub-layout in the Timeline Virtual Control Surface: “All Global Controls” where you can access all the Master controls in a single layout;

• Multigrid options to immediately set all Tracks to Inactive and to define an Inactive slot as either Silent or Pass-through;

• A Multigrid option to display a track layout, the all-seeing-eye, the mixer, the grid layout, or the shared controls layout on the secondary Virtual Control Surface (VCS). This can be useful when you’d like to display one of the layouts on an iPad using Kyma Control and another on the laptop screen, or when you’d like to display one set of controls for a performer or the audience and a different set of controls for yourself. There’s also a new Tools menu option to display the secondary VCS full-sized on a second display;

…and more. For more details, go to the Help menu in Kyma and check for for software updates.

Availability

Kyma 7.12 is available as a free update, downloadable from the Help menu in Kyma 7.

Summary

The new features in the Kyma 7.12 sound design environment are designed to help you expand your mastery over live parameter control through Capytalk, keep your sound interactions lively and dynamic with new features in the Virtual Control Surface, Timeline and Multigrid, and to expand your sonic universe with newly developed synthesis and control algorithms that can be combined with the extensive library of algorithms already in Kyma.

Background

Symbolic Sound revolutionized the live sound synthesis and processing industry with the introduction of Kyma in 1990. Today, Kyma continues to set new standards for sound quality, innovative synthesis and processing algorithms, rock-solid live performance hardware, and a supportive, professional Kyma community both online and through the annual Kyma International Sound Symposium (KISS).

For more information:

Website
Email
Twitter
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Mu-psi: a sonic analog to sci-fi


Composer and Kyma-creator Carla Scaletti, along with special guests Anna Lum (poet) and Rich O’Donnell (percussionist/composer), present an evening of Mu-psi: a sonic form of science fiction that you experience with your entire body through total immersion in the vibrational field we call sound.

Mu-psi, like sci-fi, starts with a hypothetical premise and imagines a universe in which that premise is true. Inspired by ideas like double-well potentials, friction, Huygen’s pendulum clocks, CERN, and the emergence of life from inorganic matter, the sounds are visceral, passionate, and playful.

Mu-Psi is an evening of live experimental quadraphonic electronic music where the audience is invited to listen, to ponder, to question and, at times, to help generate some of the sounds.

Produced by the HEARding Cats Collective (now in their eighth season of “working to keep St. Louis strange and wonderful”), this all-Kyma concert will be at the .ZACK, the Kranzberg Arts Foundation’s new four-story, 40,000-square foot property, developed in the historic Cadillac building in St. Louis:

Friday, 7 April – 7:30pm
.ZACK, 3224 Locust Street
St. Louis, Missouri USA

$20 General Admission, $15 Students and Artists
Tickets are available at MetroTix as well as at the door on the night of the show.

2017 SEAMUS Award Goes to Kyma Creator


On April 21 2017, the 2017 SEAMUS Award for “important contributions to the field of electroacoustic music” will be presented to Carla Scaletti at the SEAMUS National Conference banquet, following a concert of her music.

Carla is an experimental composer, designer of the Kyma sound design language and co-founder of Symbolic Sound Corporation.

SEAMUS Conference registration is now open: April 20–22, 2017 at St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

Cloud to Ground Strikes Again!


John Paul Jones and Helge Sten will be performing together as the Minibus Pimps on April 16, 2017 as part of a Présences Electroniques concert in Paris.

Since their first performance in 2011, Minibus Pimps — a unique and unconventional UK/Norwegian collaboration featuring John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin’s legendary multi-instrumentalist), and prolific electronic musician, improviser and producer Helge Sten (Deathprod, Supersilent) — have, in the words of Mark Roland, been creating a “dense, disturbing primordial world of dread and awe.”

Their debut album ‘Cloud To Ground‘ includes seven tracks, each recorded live at a different venue, from London’s Café Oto to venues in Norway and Denmark. The secret of Minibus Pimps’ colossal sonic gas giants is their use of the Kyma computer system (created by Symbolic Sound). Instruments such as guitar, bass and violin are fed into the system and radically transformed by self-designed digital instruments and processors until their sources are barely recognisable.

More info here: http://www.inagrm.com/presences-electronique-2017-0

La Berge Touring North America

Composer/Performers Anne La Berge and David Dramm are touring North America from the end of February through March 2017.  This is your chance to catch a live performance of Anne’s controversial Utter — for flute, multiple iPads and Kyma — and discover for yourself why Utter generated such intense post-concert discussion at KISS2016.

Here are the dates (in reverse chronological order so scroll down for the upcoming dates):

11 March 2017
San Francisco Center For New Music
San Francisco

10 March 2017
Indexical Concert
Radius Gallery
Tannery Arts Center
Santa Cruz
20.00

6 March 2017
Composition Colloquim with David Dramm
UC Santa Cruz
13.20 – 14.50

1 – 4 March 2017
Residency with David Dramm
Brigham Young University
3 March – La Berge solo concert
Madsen Recital Hall
19.30

28 February 2017
Solo concert
Music on Main
Vancouver
20.00

24 February 2017
INsphere
Vancouver

23 February 2017
Elastic Arts concert
with
Sam Pluta, Dana Jessen and Katherine Young
Elastic Arts, Chicago
21.00

21 February 2017
Compostion Seminar
University of Chicago

Between What Is and What Could Be…

The Hearding Cats Collective presents Between What Is and What Could Be, a concert in celebration of the 80th birthday of their co-founder and artistic director, Rich O’Donnell.

Director of the Washington University Electronic Music Studio in St. Louis, Rich O’Donnell’s musical career spans over six decades, including 43 years as principal percussionist with the St. Louis Symphony. O’Donnell is also a prolific composer, innovator and inventor of percussion and electronic instruments, a producer, a teacher and a writer.

Between What Is and What Could Be spans 47 years of creative work, from O’Donnell’s 1970 MikroTimbre I solo for amplified TamTam, to free improvisation in the present moment with the Symprov Trio, an ensemble of virtuoso current and former St. Louis Symphony Orchestra musicians Asako Kuboki (violin) and Timothy Myers (trombone), and includes interludes featuring O’Donnell’s virtual drumming on Wiimote and nunchuck to accompany Casper McElwee’s 3D Anaglyph video and live poetry performance by Anna Lum.  It’s a major birthday, so there will be other surprises as well!

Rich O 80 logo
Sunday, 26 February – 7:30pm
The Sheldon Ballroom, 3648 Washington
St. Louis, Missouri USA
General Admission $20, Student and Artist $15
Please RSVP

Visit the Hearding Cats Collective site for full details.

Anna Martinova releases Dusha II

Anna Martinova
DJ, producer, and graphic designer, Anna Martinova, has just signed with a new publisher who will be releasing her new album Dusha II in April 2017 and following up with videos and other artist collaborations. Watch Anna’s new web site for details on upcoming releases and live shows. Here’s a teaser for Dusha II drenched with mesmerizing and mysterious Kyma sounds:

Martinova works by generating WAV files in Kyma, arranging them in Logic, adding melodic lines created with Alchemy, and layering in recorded vocals using Logic and has linked her DAW with RolandCloud.

…Kyma (Pacarana) is very special tool, i am happy to be introduced to this system. It boosts up my creativity, inspiring me in every sound atom i generate with it, and the machine is limitless. The quality i have on the output is so powerful, clean and unique. I grow with it.

Known as Tulpa for her dark progressive DJ sets and Dusha for her chill out / ambient music, Anna got her start at age 17 as a vocalist in a rock band. After shifting to the psy-trance scene, she now lives in Amsterdam where she continues live DJing and producing.

Here’s a taste of her alter-ego, Tulpa:

Just Call Me God!

In Just Call Me God! John Malkovich plays a megalomaniacal dictator teetering on the brink of madness in a one-man show exploring the idea that absolute power corrupts absolutely.


Martin Haselböck (organ) and Franz Danksagmüeller (composer/organist, LinnStrument and Kyma processing) — respond to Malkovich’s words with music by Bach, Wagner and Schubert — in a confrontation of words against music. At one point, Danksagmüller even uses Kyma to merge the voice of Malkovich with the timbre of the organ, allowing the actor to speak with the voice of a mighty pipe organ — every power-mad dictator’s dream!

On tour this spring in Europe and Russia, the group is arranging bring their message to a worldwide audience early in 2018.

08-10 March 2017
Hamburg, Elbphilharmonie

12-13 March 2017
Vienna, Konzerthaus

15 March 2017
Amsterdam, Concertgebouw

18 March 2017
Groningen, De Oosterport

21 March 2017
Birmingham, Symphony Hall

23-25 March 2017
London, Union Chapel

28 March 2017
Luxembourg, Philharmonie

2 April 2017
Moscow, House of Music

4 April 2017
Budapest, Palace of Arts

9 April, 2017
Munich, Residenztheater

The rocket scientist of human hearing

In 1999, astrophysicist/musician David McClain spent an intense three-month period working on The Northern Sky Survey, mapping the sky in the near infrared while getting by on an hour of sleep per night. When he finished the survey, he was suddenly struck by a viral infection that nearly killed him; his doctors were never able to determine the cause and, after three months, the infection dissipated almost as quickly as it had appeared. But afterward David noticed that he could no longer understand his wife when she was speaking to him. He went to an audiologist and discovered he had a sensorineural hearing loss of 60-70 dB in the high frequency range. Hearing aids helped him understand speech, but he was devastated to discover that music never sounded right through the hearing aids. But as a physicist, he was determined to solve the problem.

Motivated by his love of music and informed by his scientific training, McClain has spent the last 16 years developing equations to describe the entire hearing experience – from the cochlea, to the afferent 8th nerve, to processing in the central nervous system, efferent 8th nerve interactions — and developing signal processing algorithms to adapt to and compensate for his hearing loss in a way that preserves the audio experience of music. The result is a collection of signal processing algorithms he calls Crescendo. Kyma is one of the tools David uses for testing out new ideas and prototyping them for Crescendo.

Now he’s blogging about his findings on his web site http://refined-audiometrics.com. In keeping with his motto “Keeping music enjoyable for all!” David hopes that his experiences, research findings, and extensive set of algorithms can benefit others.