Author: SSC

A photographer, a composer & a dancer…

What happens when an artist, a composer, an actor, and a dancer meet in an art gallery? Find out next month, when Phil Curtis travels from Los Angeles to London to perform with photographer Kelly Nipper, actor Małgorzata Białek, and dancer Marissa Ruazol in Tessa Pattern Takes a Picture at the South London Gallery. The hour-long piece features  electronic music performed live by Curtis using a combination of Ableton Live and Kyma processing.   Curtis used 24 drawings based on Labanotation  as the inspiration for the score, transforming each page into a two-and-a-half minute segment of music.

Tessa Pattern Takes a Picture explores the spatial, expressive qualities of time when rendered in a photograph or a film.   It touches on the history of photography, the Black Forest, clocks, and the ideas of Rudolf Laban (an early twentieth century movement theorist). The piece opens on Saturday 1 March 2014 at 7 pm in the Main Gallery of the South London Gallery.

In the meantime, back in Los Angeles, Floodsongs, the album Curtis recorded with Anne LeBaron has just been released; it features Kyma-generated electronic sounds on the title track, LeBaron’s piece for vocal ensemble: Floodsongs.

National Illusion

Javier Umpierrez has just finished the sound design and music for a trailer for Ilusión Nacional, Olallo Rubio‘s upcoming documentary on the history of Mexico’s national soccer team, that conveys the passion and the politics behind the world’s most popular sport.

In the trailer, Umpierrez used Kyma to create and control the vast, powerful crowd sounds as well as other sound design elements. Starting with a recording he made of a full-capacity crowd in Aztec Stadium, he’s been utilizing Kyma’s SampleCloud and controlling pitch and amplitude in real time using Kyma Control on the iPad.

Umpierrez is also doing the score and the sound design for the film itself, so we can look forward to even more awesome crowd effects and inspiring music when the film opens in April 2014.

The Voice of Pi

Composer Franz Danksagmüller and soprano Berit Barfred Jensen will be in Copenhagen for the February 19th premiere of Danksagmüller’s new composition for voice and Kyma: sound of pi: flow my tears (for voice and continuo).

Danksagmüller will be performing the basso continuo part on a Continuum Fingerboard controlling Kyma sounds tuned to a special scale based on pi. Background textures will be granulated voices derived from the live solo voice.

It will be the first piece on Berit Barfred Jensen‘s solo voice recital at the Old Radio Hall at the Royal Danish Conservatoire in Copenhagen with the Holmes’s Baroque Ensemble and Søren Rastogi (piano). Music by Handel, Schubert, Grieg, Margarete Schweikert and Franz Danksagmüller.

Date: Wednesday 19 February 2014 
Time: at. 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Location: Conservatory Koncertsal, Julius Thomsen Gade 1
Admission: Free admission

 

 

Petits Personnages

Sound designer Gurwal COÏC-GALLAS was asked to create a language for the little creatures that appear in the newest version of The Beauty and the Beast directed by Christophe Gans. Gurwal used Kyma to create their charming bird-like language (here’s a brief example):

Take your favorite child (whether or not her name is Belle) to see the premiere of The Beauty and the Beast (played, respectively, by Léa Seydoux and Vincent Cassel) on 12 February 2014. You can see what the creatures (called Tadums) look like in the trailer:

What if the stars made music

Outdoor Culture presents Sounds of the Night Sky featuring Robert Jarvis‘ sound installation: aroundNorth, opening Thursday 20 February 2014 6.30-9.30 pm at the National Trust Stowe New Inn Farm Buckingham MK18 5EQ

This outdoor event will showcase the premier of Robert Jarvis’ new sound art installation, aroundNorth, a piece that was shortlisted for the 2010 PRS New Music Award.  A multi-speaker sound map of the stars driven by the turning of the Earth, aroundNorth uses Kyma to transform the night sky into a celestial music box rotating around Polaris, the North Star. As each star passes a virtual line in the sky, it triggers a musical note whose qualities are determined by the star’s spectrum, mass, brightness and distance from earth, creating a mesmerising sound map of the universe as viewed from our rotating planet.

Visitors will be accompanied down Bell Gate Drive on foot and into the gardens of Stowe after dark, before entering the semi-wilderness of the newly-opened Lamport Garden where the sounds of moving stars will be created like a giant celestial music box! Dress for the outdoors and bring a flashlight!  Click here for more information and tickets.

Cristian Vogel’s second hometown

Cristian Vogel is currently composer-in-residence in a small village in Southern Japan called Kimotsuki Town, participating in a Second Home Town, an experimental arts initiative of contemporary dance artist, JOU and audio/visual artist, Mitsuaki Matsumoto.

Photo 16-01-2014 08 44 04

The three artists will work together for two weeks in Kimotsuki Town before traveling to Tokyo to present some of the results of the residency with Cristian performing Kyma, JOU dancing and Mitsu improvising on his own custom-made stringed instrument.

26th Jan  14:30-15:30 (Kawakami, Kimutski Town)
踊る地域案内所クロージングイベント
Osumi dancing arts and area information center
-winter artists in residence project-
in Kawakami village, Kimotsuki Town.
Closing event short  performances and concert
http://osumiart.exblog.jp/i21/

28th Jan (Kagoshima city)
croisements kagoshima vol.0
â—‹ sound + â—‹ food + â—‹ dance
open: 19:00 start: 19:30
Hananoki Farm Lab. Sandwich included
venue : tenmonkan area [NPO法人かごしま文化研究所 文学サロン 月の舟 /tsuki-no-fune]
4-6-3F, nakamachi, kagoshima city
http://tsukinofune.sakura.ne.jp
reservation :croisekag0@gmail.com
1st set: Kubo(piano), Mitsuaki Matsumoto, JOU
2nd set: Cristian Vogel

29th Jan (Tokyo)
Cristian Vogel (solo show) @ super-deluxe, Tokyo
https://www.super-deluxe.com/
六本木スーパーデラックス

31st Jan – Cristian Vogel solo show and guests (Takasaki)
@WOAL
http://members3.jcom.home.ne.jp/woal/

1st Feb -  Kosmoslane gallery (Tokyo)
http://www.kosmoslane.com
experimental music group improvisation and solo show
代々木上原コスモスレーン

2nd Feb -  Mitaka Reversible Destiny Lofts
http://www.rdloftsmitaka.com/
Cristian Vogel, Mitsuaki Matsumoto, JOU
三鷹天命反転住宅
music and dance improvisation

8th Feb. Temple in Kamiya Cho- near to Roppongi
http://www.komyo.net/kot/
Cristian Vogel (solo) & with JOU

Cloud to Ground

Inspired by some of the more awesome forces of nature, Cloud to Ground, the Minibus Pimps’ first album, is due out in March 2014.  To quote Luis Fernandez’s preview in Crazy Friday:

‘Black Aurora’ is an electronic suite in four movements, pulsing and hovering like some collapsing dark star. The title track is a monstrous duet for icicles and cathedral organ, and the other pieces are masses of sound and noise explored in different densities.

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. This method continues John Paul Jones’s experiments with computer music which began as far back as the late 70s.

Cloud to Ground is seven tracks performed live by the Minibus Pimps duo — John Paul Jones and Helge Sten — at various venues in London, Norway, and Denmark and news of the debut album was featured in The Guardian newspaper.

Kyma days at Future Music Oregon

 

FMO Kyma Concert

Carla Scaletti was the featured guest artist on the 23 November 2013 Future Music Oregon concert at Beall Concert Hall in Eugene Oregon where the audience performed her compositions: Autocatalysis for Kyma and Live Audience (2010) and …odd kind of sympathy for Kyma and Live Audience (2011). The concert also featured Kyma premieres by composers Colin Salisbury, Nayla Mehdi, and Churan Feng and live performances of Jeffrey Stolet’s Theatre of Spheres for Kyma and Colored Spheres and Lariat Rituals for Kyma and Gametrak.

Jeffrey Stolet

Following the Saturday concert, Scaletti conducted an all-day Kyma sound design workshop on Sunday and presented lectures on data sonification and the score for QUANTUM, a deconstruction of how Kyma was used in …odd kind of sympathy, and an advanced Kyma sound design lecture on the following Monday and Tuesday.

Kyma users from Arizona, California, New Mexico, Washington, and Oregon joined with Jeffrey Stolet’s graduate and undergraduate students in the workshops, hands-on labs, meal-time discussions, and some of the intense dark roast beverage the Pacific northwest is famous for.

 

Sound design for Beyond Two Souls

We asked sound designer Mathieu Fiorentini of Quantic Dream to talk about how he used Kyma in the sound design for the PS-3 interactive psychological action thriller — Beyond Two Souls — starring Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe:

Throughout the whole game, the player encounters creatures from the other side, called the Entities. We designed the Entities sounds as a team.  For the part of the job that was assigned to me, Kyma helped me a lot to find and propose  layers for the movements and the growls of the creatures. I recorded some collections from the Tau Player, then put the results into the 3DMorphSampleCloud to merge with some human voices. I also got some very exciting results from the 100 Whooshes patch from JED (sound designer, Jean-Edouard Miclot).

In the final chapter of the game, I used Kyma for creatures and ambient sound.  For example:

In this sound, the player is inside a kind of supernatural tempest. So I needed very consistent sound for the ambience. I used the 3DMorphSampleCloud prototype to merge and modulate various sound effects (wind, sand movements, volcano, dogs growl, my voice).

This is the sound made by some weird monsters made from sand particles; they come up from out of the ground to attack Jodie (the main character). I used the CrossFilter prototype to cross human voices and moans with the sounds of wind and gas jets.

I’m new Kyma user (1 year), and I’m so excited about getting deeper and deeper into Kyma. There’s something unusual and magic when I switch on my Pacarana. I know I’m going to spend time dedicated to search and experiment, and I often forget that I’m working on a computer. It helps me to focus only on the most important thing: the sound.

— Mathieu Fiorentini

P.S . Here is the complete list of the Quantic Dreams’ main audio team for Beyond Two Souls:

Alexis Antoni, sound designer
Sylvain Buffet, sound designer
Lorne Bafle, music composer
Xavier Despas, lead sound designer
Mathieu Fiorentini, sound sesigner
Laurent Gabiot, dialog recordist
Mary Lockwood, music manager
Mathieu Muller, sound designer
Stéphane Tréziny, dialog editor
Dominique Voegele, sound designer
Hans Zimmer, music producer