Light Time Delay

“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”:

The wonder of existence hums and dances in the laughter of newborn stars, each speck of stardust a pattern in the universe’s unyielding creativity. From the first heartbeat of matter to the delicate unfurling of an infants’s tiny hand, creation sings its symphony in stardust spun into stories…

You are awake and aching with beauty, standing at the crossroads of all that ever was and all that will ever be. Everything has led up to this moment, this heartbeat, this singular point of light in the endless dark…

This may be just the thing we needed to hear amidst the unrelenting barrage of news this year.

If Light Time Delay’s setup makes you think of “Mission Control”, there may be a reason: Gauthier is the software architect for NASA/JPL’s High Performance Spaceflight Computing project — developing the next-generation on-board computing system for future deep space robotic and Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) missions.

It turns out some of the requirements for High Performance Spaceflight Computing bear an uncanny similarity to the challenges of real-time musical performances (albeit at a much, much larger scale).

  • Handling vast amounts of data generated by instruments and sensors, performing complex calculations and data analysis in real-time.
  • Running software that controls various subsystems, such as navigation, communication, power management, and scientific instruments.
  • Data communication between the spacecraft and ground control, ensuring that mission data is transmitted efficiently and commands from Earth are received and executed correctly — a task made more challenging by the aforementioned Light Time Delay latency.
  • Supporting some autonomous decision-making capabilities, allowing the spacecraft to perform tasks without real-time human intervention, which is crucial for missions far from Earth.
  • Fault tolerance and error correction features to ensure reliable operation in the harsh environment of space (or on stage?).

All of this computing power is to support NASA in its mission to answer fundamental questions about life beyond Earth through exploration and science:

  • Are we alone?
  • What does tomorrow bring?
  • How is our universe changing?

“I am so very impressed with Kyma and Pacamara. It’s big brained and I love that.”
—Théa-Martine Gauthier

To coin a phrase: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to use Kyma… but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some Kyma artists actively involved in developing the next-generation High Performance Spaceflight software for NASA!

Chi Wang featured artist at TURNUP

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.

Marthyia de Abdul Hamid

Composer, sound designer, lecturer, acoustic communication specialist and teacher, Carlos Alberto Augusto, performed the premiere of his new project Marthyia de Abdul Hamid at Teatro da Rainha on 5 April 2025 in Caldas da Rainha, Portugal.

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)

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 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.

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”)

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:

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).

Metropolis in Geneva

Laurel and Harder climbing an organ pipe
Poster for the 11th edition of The Organ Makes its Cinema festival in Geneva

Organist/composer Franz Danksagmüller will perform a live Ciné-concert combining Kyma electronics with a 1937 Wurlitzer organ to accompany Fritz Lang’s classic silent film Metropolis at Collége Claparède in Geneva on 27 March at 8 pm.

The day before the concert, Danksagmüller is presenting a masterclass on organ and electronics improvisation for live cinema: 26 March 2025 at 2 pm.

The Ciné-concert and masterclass are part of the eleventh edition of “L’orgue fait son cinéma” festival which promises a rich and varied program — great films, great organists, regional roots, international influences, a program for young people and families, original combinations, great repertoire and contemporary creation — there’s something for everyone at this festival centered on the 1937 Wurlitzer organ of the Collège Claparède (a middle-school named for 19th century Swiss neurologist Édouard Claparède).

L’orgue fait son cinéma’s fusion of tradition and innovation is perfectly reflected by the school’s motto,

Intelligence is the ability to solve new problems

At Collége Claparède, chemin de Fossard 61, 1231 Conches, Genève

Umano Post Umano

On 19 December 2024, composer Agostino Di Scipio utilized live Kyma signal processing in his ambitious intermedia work premiered at the Nuova Consonanza festival.

Umano Post Umano is, in some sense, a review of Di Scipio’s artistic work, exposing the full range of performance practices he has explored over the last 25 years (since he first introduced Audible Ecosystemics). Umano Post Umano features music, electroacoustic environments and digital audio processing by Agostino Di Scipio, video projections and stage design by Matias Guerra, texts collected from job advertisements, legal and financial advertising and from Hesiod’s Theogony, as well as multiple performers on acoustic instruments, each of whom also operates a live camera.

The work has its origins in a 2008 commission by the Società dei Concerti “Barattelli” in L’Aquila, but work on the project had to be suspended and cancelled as a result of the devastating L’Aquila earthquake of April 2009. Revived and rethought for the Nuova Consonanza 2024 festival and the Pelanda space, the chamber music theater project evolved and emerged with a new title and concept: Umano post umana*.

Central to the work is the concept of sound as the interface. Sound events are never of solely human origin but are always hybrid and distributed according to ecosystemic dynamics where each component is in contact with every other part. The piece reflects, through the experience of sound, today’s exasperating conditions of precarious work, an expression of a conception of the human as a resource managed by mechanistic and algorithmic agents.

Each aspect of the performance – according to a reduced economy of instrumental, electroacoustic, computer and telematic means – evolves in relative autonomy but as a function of the specific performance space – “in real time” but above all “in real space”. What emerges is a coherent ensemble that is nevertheless precarious and subject to disorientation, drifts and possible failures. The overall whole emerges from the material interdependence of performers, shared spaces and creative appropriation of means.

Microphones and loudspeakers are irregularly scattered throughout the space and light, semi-transparent sheets cut the space irregularly. In the soft light, there are workstations with laptops, small percussion instruments and various accessories – as well as musical instruments: flutes, cello, bass clarinet, timpani (all equipped with electronic prostheses that “increase” but also “decrease” and over-determine the instrumental gestures). Each workstation is an autonomous instrumental-electroacoustic-computer chain, not subject to centralized direction or management.

The instruments themselves are mechanical components of a system, from whose functioning they are not independent. The performers have their own service lights (headlamps) and low-resolution webcams through which they watch (monitor?) each other. Lights and images pass through the sheets, projecting onto the walls, onto the performers, and onto the listeners. Some operators wander around in the dim light providing “emergency” technical maintenance to the various workstations.

In the economy of means thus designed, the occurrence and articulation of sounds remain tied to the here-and-now of performative circumstances and contingencies: is it possible that – from silence, from background noise, from acoustic residues of the place, from the mere co-presence of humans and machines – frictions and contacts are formed, that signals and a meaning arise? The sounds take shape from distributed relations, from uncertain and open co- and inter-dependencies, heard at times as atmospheric textures, and, at other times, as clear transient gestures.

Music is made first of all by listening: listening is an active part of the performative dynamic. One acts and is constantly acted upon, one is bound by what one intends to bind: here “music” is the tension of this being more and less of oneself. Performative tension in unstable equilibrium, for whose precariousness (tragic) we must be grateful. In sound we listen (welcome) the conditions of the happening of events and the conditions of our welcoming them (listening).

 

On 8 November 2024, Di Scipio performed in Essen Germany with his former student Dario Sanfilippo as part of the Philharmonie Essen NOW! Laissez vibrer Late Night Concert Machine Milieu. Machine Milieu is a joint live electronics project in which the two performers’ computer music systems are networked with each other. The idea is to view the human performer, the equipment, and the performance space as three places connected to each other through the medium of sound. According to Di Scipio and Sanfilippo, “Machine Milieu” can “develop an integral and potentially autonomous performance ecosystem based exclusively on location-specific acoustic information.” For this performance, the acoustic details were provided by the RWE Pavilion in Essen.


Di Scipio is the chair of the Electronic Music department at Conservatory of L’Aquila, and the chief coordinator of the doctoral board (supervising all PhDs in “artistic research in music”).

In 2020, he completed his PhD at University of Paris VIII with the dissertation, What is « living » in live electronics performance ? : an ecosystemic perspective on sound art and music creative practices, in which he explores the question of “liveness” in the performance of live electronic music, particularly in view of the fact that any performance approach today relies on a large set of heterogeneous technological infrastructures. He proposes a “systemic” view of liveness, and describes the operational details of his own artistic research endeavors. Finally, moving from the “living” character of electronic performance to the “lived” experience of sound, he poses the question of an “ecosystem consciousness” in the cognitive process of listening, particularly as it relates to compositional and sound art practices based on a strict economy of means.