Composer/performer Anne La Berge was the featured artist for the 2025 SPLICE Institute — an annual Institute designed for performers and composers to study the integration of performance with electronics where she presented several performances, worked with student composers, and was invited to do an introductory session on how she uses Kyma in her work.
During the conference, she became a role model for students seeking artistic careers outside of academia.
Earlier in the summer, she was featured in the Cortona Sessions for New Music (20 July – 1 August, 2025 in Ede, Netherlands) — an educational program dedicated to the creation and performance of contemporary music, and a meeting place for emerging composers and performers seeking to collaborate, learn, grow, and create.
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.
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 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’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”)
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: 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).
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,
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. Continue reading “Umano Post Umano”
At the IRCAM Forum Workshops @Seoul 6-8 November 2024, composer Steve Everett presented a talk on the compositional processes he used to create FIRST LIFE: a 75-minute mixed media performance for string quartet, live audio and motion capture video, and audience participation.
FIRST LIFE is based on work that Everett carried out at the Center of Chemical Evolution, a NSF/NASA funded project at multiple universities to examine the possibility of the building blocks of life forming in early Earth environments. He worked with stochastic data generated by Georgia Tech biochemical engineer Martha Grover and mapped them to standard compositional structures (not as a scientific sonification, but to help educate the public about the work of the center through a musical performance).
Data from IRCAM software and PyMOL were mapped to parameters of physical models of instrumental sounds in Kyma. For example, up to ten data streams generated by the formation of monomers and polymers in Grover’s lab were used to control parameters of the “Somewhat stringish” model in Kyma (such as delay rate, BowRate, position, decay, etc). Everett presented a poster about this work at the 2013 NIME Conference in Seoul, and has uploaded some videos from the premiere of First Life at Emory University.
Currently on the music composition faculty of the City University of New York (CUNY), Professor Everett is teaching a doctoral seminar on timbre in the spring (2025) semester and next fall he will co-teach a course on music and the brain with Patrizia Casaccia, director of the Neuroscience Initiative at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center.
