Author: SSC

Like the Sea Itself

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.

Kyma shines at the 2025 Sonification Awards

Two projects powered by Kyma received top honors at the 2025 Sonification Awards this year.

Often likened to a Michelin star in the data sonification world, the Sonification Awards recognize excellence and encourage best practices in the field of transforming data into sound.

• Congratulations to Jon Bellona for his award in the Public Outreach category for The 2015 Axial Seamount Eruption — part of Amy Bower’s Accessible Oceans project. Listen to the winning sonifications below!

• In the Data Analysis category, Carla Scaletti and Martin Gruebele won for the sonifications in their paper “Hydrogen bonding heterogeneity correlates with protein folding transition state passage time as revealed by data sonification” in collaboration with Gruebele’s Protein Sonification group. Dive deeper by reading the paper, or by watching the video summary below:

 

Kyma artists at SEAMUS ’25

Kyma artists participated in multiple concerts during the SEAMUS ’25 conference at Purdue University in March 2025.

The winner of the 2025 SEAMUS/SWEETWATER commission prize was Yao Hsiao for her composition Daiyu, for voice, iPad and Kyma. Yao is a doctoral student at the University of Oregon, studying with Jeffrey Stolet. She completed her master’s degree with Chi Wang at Indiana University, where the piece was composed.

Scott Miller opened the conference with his COINCIDENT#7,  performing live Kyma electronics with collaborators Sam Wells and Adam Vidiksis.

Featured on the same concert, Michael Wittgraf performed his piece for EWI and Kyma: Absence of Hope.

Sound artist/composer Mike Wittgraf performing with EWI & Kyma at SEAMUS ’25

In other SEAMUS concerts, Chi Wang performed her piece Fusion of the Horizons, for JoyCon, RingCon, Max, and Kyma.

Chi Wang at SEAMUS ’25 Photo by Mike Wittgraf

John Ritz presented his composition for cello and live adaptive Kyma signal processing.

Kelsey Wang performed her composition Mahjong: Peng Gang Chi, for Wacom tablet and Kyma.

Kelsey Wang performing with Kyma & Wacom tablet, photo by Mike Wittgraf

Among the fixed media pieces, several utilized Kyma for the sound design:

  • Minho Kang, The Mist, fixed media
  • Wyatt Cannon, Something About Birds, fixed media (8-channel, Kyma)
  • Mei-ling Lee, RUN
  • Brian Belet, My Last Tape piece

The closing event of the conference was Places | Spaces | Traces, a large telematic improvisation ensemble organized by conference host Tae Hong Park, which included Brian Belet performing electric bass and Kyma via remote connection from his home studio in Hawai’i.

Cork thru & threw

Composer/performer Anne La Berge released two albums in March:

Anne notes that Cork is “very patient music” compared to her other collaborations, primarily because Phil is a drone artist. She provided a time-stamped guide to the Kyma effects to listen for in each track:

Cuan an Chaislean, Phil on drones
0.00 Granular Reverb
4.45 Very soft Formant shifting, with changing settings for dissonance & pitch
6.40 The formant shifting is more audible
10.01 Random gating using the chopper with changing settings
Going through a Granular Reverb in different presets
17.12 Random chopper gating with a much different Granular Reverb setting

Cork, Phil on drones
0.29 Granular reverb using short grains on flute noise / airy timbre
5.59 Kyma – ‘Cathedral’ abstract melody – sine tones mixed with changing noise
Random envelopes, speeds, Continued Granular reverb flute
8.01 Flute multiphonics start to enter still using the Granular reverb

Maureen’s, Phil on drone and occasional noise interruptions
0.00 Piccolo – Non-harmonic analysis with delays through Spectral Modification triggering an OscillatorBank – A sound I call Scram
Whistle tones, multiphonics, airy pitches
9.45 Piccolo with a waveshaper and highpass filter – a sound I call Glitch – with Reverb
11.46 Piccolo with Glitch, delay and a fat long reverb
14.00 The other sounds are Phil’s
16.00 Piccolo circular breathing through the Glitch, delay and long reverb
17.18 Whistle tones plus airy piccolo tones through the same processing

 

Of Threw, Thru & Through, Anne writes: “These tracks are from an afternoon of play in the studio. Overdubs by Suzana Lașcu came a few years later when we decided to release our pre-pandemic wildness.”

Anne La Berge at KISS2017

Wittgraf & Belet at EMM festival

Mike Wittgraf’s Turning for flute and live Kyma processing was performed at the Electronic Music Midwest festival in Kansas City on 4-5 April 2025 by featured composer/performer Lisa Bost-Sandberg.

Wittgraf’s Turning is a play on words inspired by the mechanism of Bost-Sandberg’s Kingma System® flute with Glissando Headjoint® and, according to Wittgraf, Bost-Sandberg “thrilled audience members every time she played” at EMM.

Bost-Sandberg also performed Wittgraf’s A Vox Novus short for flute and fixed media (produced with Kyma).

Mike Wittgraf’s Pacamara is apparently capable of drawing power from the air during the dress rehearsal for his fixed media piece.

Sharing a concert with Wittgraf, Brian Belet‘s fixed media composition My Last Tape Piece was performed at the conference as an 8.4.1 sound structure (8 surround sound speakers on the floor, plus 4 elevated quad speakers).

EMM features a 12-channel immersive system, Yamaha powered speakers and subwoofers, and a Digico S21 mixer (named “EMMilia”)

A 50/50 split

Alan M. Jackson has pledged to share the proceeds from his new track Mediation One  in a 50/50 split with his musical collaborators: a choir of birds from his West Sussex garden and another from the South Downs. (The birds’ half of the money goes toward the purchase of high quality RSPB bird food.)

Meditation One (feat. NATURE) features Alan M Jackson on fujara, gong, and modular bells accompanied by West Sussex peri-urban birds (the first bird choir) and the Birds of the South Downs (second bird choir).

Alan’s performance is processed through the Kyma CrossFilter with a “wintry” impulse response: several years ago, he brought a field recorder along on a skiing trip in the French Alps where he captured people skiing past, around and down the slope of some scratchy sounding hard-pack snow which became the impulse response for this spring (as in the season) reverberation.

The “first choir” of birds was recorded from Alan’s studio window (he had to EQ away the traffic noise). He decided to perform outdoors along with this track on a local iron-age hill fort. While he was was mixing, he noticed that the birds around him were impressively louder and clearer than the first choir, so he stopped and set up his mics to record them. But by the time he was ready they’d gone quiet. That’s when he realized that the birds had been reacting to hearing the recording of the first choir (probably in a “stressed out, territorial, get-off-my-hill, kind of way”). So he alternated between playing short sections of the first bird choir, then stopping to record the second choir’s reactions.

The cover art comes from a water color painted by Alan on top of the same hill at sunset during the planetary alignment (the white dot is Venus). It’s an hour hike down from the top so staying to paint the sunset meant he had to stumble back in the dark (that part is not depicted in the painting).

Phillips & Cannon at MOXsonic

Two Kyma artists were featured in this year’s MOXsonic (Missouri Experimental Sonic Arts) Festival — three days of concerts, research presentations, workshops, installations, and conversations, 19-21 March 2025.

Wyatt Cannon presented “7”, a multichannel fixed media piece with sounds generated in Kyma. Wyatt, currently pursuing a Master of Music in Computer Music Composition at Indiana University with Chi Wang and John Gibson, uses sound manipulations inspired by evolution and astronomy to create long-form narratives that express the human urge to understand our place in the universe.
 
Mark Phillips performed his composition Waiting, for EWI and Kyma, featuring semi-autonomous algorithms guided and conducted using audio signals and MIDI data from the EWI while the performer responds to and interacts with the Kyma algorithms. No prerecorded audio or MIDI files were used in the live performance.

Here’s a 2018 lecture Mark presented on his use of the EWI with Kyma in another piece:

Driving the user experience with sound

Interview with Lowell Pickett, Senior Audio Engineer at Zoox
A man with light brown curly hair wearing a cap and orange hoodie, smiling and holding a microphone, posing a question after a conference presentation
Lowell Pickett at the Kyma International Sound Symposium in Brussels (KISS 2013)

Every company should have an audio professional on staff!

—Lowell Pickett, Senior Audio Engineer at Zoox / Sound Lab

Eighth Nerve (EN): Yes! I agree 100%! Could I ask you to reflect on the skills and experience that someone from professional audio can bring to other industries (i.e., alternative applications of sound and audio)?

Lowell Pickett (LP): I often take my skills for granted, but the difference between a good-enough and a well-polished audio asset can truly impact engagement and can help to define a product when done well.

Sound is a ubiquitous component of our day-to-day, media-filled experience, and we often simply accept whatever audio quality might be convenient at any given moment – but sound has the potential to offer so much delight…  In many situations where people have become accustomed to marginal audio quality – an old, well-used comms system perhaps or a family video that’s been watched many times – some applied audio knowledge can truly improve the (audio) quality of their life.

A well considered audio experience improves workplaces and recreational spaces alike – and a positive audio association with a brand or personal reputation can be a distinguishing characteristic.
Continue reading “Driving the user experience with sound”

Generative sound design in Kyma

By augmenting traditional sample-based sound design with generative models, you gain additional parameters that you can perform to picture or control with a data stream from a model world — like a game engine. Once you have a parameterized model, you can generate completely imaginary spaces populated by hallucinatory sound-generating objects and creatures.

Thanks to Mark Ali and Matt Jefferies for capturing and editing the lecture on Generative Sound Design in Kyma presented last November by Carla Scaletti for Charlie Norton’s students at the University of West London.

Sons of Chipotle at Saariaho Festival

Anssi Kartunnen & John Paul Jones posing in front of a prickly pear cactus in New Mexico
Sons of Chipotle: Anssi Kartunnen & John Paul Jones

John Paul Jones and Anssi Karttunen are the Sons of Chipotle, described as “what happens when two free spirits join forces for an unbridled sonic expedition…” Known for their curiosity and a willingness to learn and explore, when Sons of Chipotle improvise, boundaries and preconceptions disappear.

Jones and Karttunen were both friends of Kaija Saariaho, and the admiration was mutual. Karttunen had been involved with all of Saariaho’s cello works since they had both moved to Paris in the 1980s.

In memory of Kaija, the Sons of Chipotle will perform with piano, cello, a wide variety of controllers, and live Kyma processing on Saturday 15 March 2025 at the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam as part of the first Saariaho Festival (13-16 March 2025).