Author: SSC

Resistance & irritation in Berlin

So-called new music is an aesthetic of resistance, of irritation, and self-reflection. In contrast to the visual arts, in which abstract and contextual works have long been accepted as a matter of course, the analogous musical experience continues to be difficult. So Schoenberg’s prognosis that his works would be understood 50 years down the road has remained illusory.


Bruno Liberda is a composer, promoter and performer. His lecture UNERHÖRT! 3000 (0) years new music is a tour de force through the history of sound systems, instrument developments and notation, and leads us to a new focus on hearing.

Text and Lecture: Bruno Liberda
Idea, development and scenic means: Fanny Brunner

A co-production of dreizehnterjanuar Wien and Wiener Klangwerkstatt. Funded by the Austrian Cultural Forum Berlin

TMIE — mediating the inner and outer sound worlds

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Carlos Alberto Augusto’s new opera “TMIE, on the threshold of the outside world” just had a successful premiere in Lisbon on Thursday September 8th, 2016, at the O’culto da Ajuda; so successful in fact, that they added two additional performances! Apparently, the sound quality of the 10-track Kyma-generated score also attracted attention and appreciation from composers in the audience.

The 51 minute work was entirely composed in Kyma and is dedicated to Portuguese soprano Marina Pacheco who performs three roles over the course of the opera — Meretseger, who loves silence; Selene, who drives her silver chariot through the skies and vibrates to the beats of the stars; and Corypheaus who listens and tries to interpret their dialog.

The TMIE gene (Transmembrane Inner Ear) is implicated in the development of the cochlea and in the synthesis of a protein that mediates between the outer acoustic environment and the inner sound world of the auditory nerve and the auditory cortex of the brain; in the opera, TMIE serves as a metaphor for the interface between the inner and outer self.

For more details and contact information on how to program this work, please see Augusto’s fascinating program notes and news site.

How technology & music mutually influence each other

What would happen if you sat the designers of Reaktor, the LinnStrument, Ableton Live, and Kyma down together on a couch and asked them to talk about how music influences technology, how technology influences music, and what exactly is a musical instrument anyway? That’s what happened at the 2015 Loop Summit. Dennis DeSantis (author of Making Music and moderator of the discussion) wrote this summary with video clips.

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One man’s junk is another man’s musical instrument

Since childhood, composer/performer Franz Danksagmüller has been fascinated with the rich, interesting sound palette one can create from broken, discarded and so-called unplayable instruments. In 2013, on a visit to a local junkyard, he noticed a strange metal object that immediately captured his attention.

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Read the story of how he added contact mics and sensors and developed a bowing technique to transform this strange object (which he later discovered was part of a device for food preservation) into a new musical instrument that sends both audio and MIDI control data to Kyma.

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You can hear this mysterious and beautiful instrument performed live at KISS2016, when Danksagmüller and composer/performer/computer scientist John Mantegna perform their new piece — The Artificial Brain!
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Conjuring with Kyma

Take a nighttime walk through the densely forested uncanny valley of Barton McLean’s imagination, where sounds become amplifiers of horror or wonder, and symphonic landscapes insinuate animal cries and wilderness. Barton McLean’s Night Conjuror is the latest in his series of evocative scores with suggestive accompanying visuals (as McLean reminds us, the visuals are there to set a mood only — the sound is the primary focus).

My goal is to always let the electronic sounds mimic the real world, and the real world sounds mimic the electronic. It is only since I have been working with Kyma 7 that this goal has been realized to the extent I hoped someday it would.

—Barton McLean          

Live from the subconscious of Barton McLean

Dreamscapes, Barton McLean‘s ambitious new suite of five pieces with video accompaniment, explores the uncanny parallels between music and dream logic.

Symphonic in texture, complexity, and visceral impact, with an impressively broad sonic palette, ranging from quasi-acoustic, to raw electronic, to sounds that are indescribably ambiguous and fresh — electronic yet entirely physically plausible, this all-Kyma soundtrack is electronics with the subtlety and dynamics of acoustic instruments. It’s like listening in on the soundtrack of the universal unconscious.

Composer on a NASA mission

Composer Roland Kuit was recently interviewed on the prime time news program SBS 6 Hart van Nederland to discuss his Kyma sound explorations that will be launched into space on September 8, 2016 on NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission to the near-earth asteroid Bennu.

While his music is being launched into space on September 8 2016, Kuit will be at the Kyma International Sound Symposium in Leicester, UK presenting his music and ideas along with filmmaker Karin Schomaker so you’ll have an opportunity to meet and talk with him at KISS2016.

Silvia Matheus at CMMR in Brazil


Composer/sound designer Silvia Matheus is one of the presenters on the scientific program of the 12th International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research (CMMR2016) in São Paulo, Brazil on 05-08 July 2016. Matheus’ talk, State of Art in Sound Design, Production and Synthesis will include an opportunity for conference attendees to learn more about how Silvia uses Kyma in her sound design and composition work and to interact directly with her Kyma 7/Pacarana system.