Category: Event

The Collaboratory

What if you could hear your music performed on a 500 year old organ that was once played by J.S. Bach? What if you could invent a new kind of live DJ set with Kyma and live percussion? Or work with an opera singer and a pop singer to develop new ways of transforming the voice in a live performance? What if you could spend several days experimenting with live Kyma-processing of strings, woodwinds, piano, percussion, and other acoustic instruments?

The Collaboratory is a “collaboration laboratory” where you can be part of a team of composers/performers/technologists inventing a new kind of live performance piece, live improvisation, live sound-track-to-picture performance, live DJ set or experimental live interaction involving Kyma and acoustic or electronic performers. The choices are yours, and the possibilities are limitless. Make a proposal and see what happens!

http://kiss2014.symbolicsound.com/the-collaboratory

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

 

 

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.

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.

 

Isikyakar in Ankara

Ilker Isikyakar, sound designer and composer at Cloud18 post production studios in New York, will be in Ankara (Turkey) on 31 October and 1 November to make a presentation on Kyma at the Audio Technologies For Music and Media international Conference (ATMM 2013).

Audio Technologies for Music and Media is an international interdisciplinary conference that focuses on various aspects of audio, audiovisual and music technologies for music and media as well as the relationship between sound, music and image in both ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ media.

Isikyakar will demonstrate how he utilizes Kyma in his work and talk about how Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi‘s nine elements of flow apply to his way of interacting with Kyma. Csikszentmihalyi describes the ‘flow state’ as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one…”

You can read Ilker Isikyakar’s abstract in the ATMM 2013 Program booklet.

John Balcom Scores Big Shot

Composer John Balcom recently completed the score for a new documentary utilizing Kyma as his synthesis tool kit.  BIG SHOT, part of ESPN’s award-winning series 30 FOR 30, tells the story of John Spano’s notorious purchase of the New York Islanders hockey team – which, 4 months after it happened, was exposed as one of the biggest scams in sports history. Directed by Kevin Connolly (E from ENTOURAGE), the film offers the first ever interview with Spano. It’s a pretty incredible story — Newsday called it “a must-watch for anyone with an interest in the power of delusion — both of the self and of others.” The film will be premiering Oct 22nd at 8pm EST on ESPN, and will eventually be available on demand as well as Netflix.

Far more than a sports documentary, the film is, at its core, the story of how a con man pulled off an incredible scam, and much of Balcom’s music speaks to this part of the film. The main instruments used were harp, piano, percussion, and synth, with Kyma supplying most of the synth parts.

When asked why he uses Kyma, Balcom responds, “I find the sound quality second to none. It has become an invaluable tool for me and I find myself using it more and more in my projects.”

Kyma at Musicacoustica Beijing

Three world premieres at the Musicacustica Beijing 2013 festival are utilizing Kyma for live sound generation and processing:

Magic Fingers for Leap Motion and Kyma by composer/performer Wang Chi, a composer and performer whose research and composition interests include data driven instruments and sound design. Chi is also an active translator for electronic music related books, including Kyma and the SOS Disco Club.

 

The FA Yun An man for Kyma by composer Wang Chunming, associate professor of Zhejiang University of Media and Communications, PhD candidate in digital media at the Shanghai Conservatory Of Music, and Director of the Institute of China Electronic Music.

 

And Theatre of Spheres by composer Jeffrey Stolet of the University of Oregon. Jeffrey Stolet is a professor of music and director of the Intermedia Music Technology at the University of Oregon where he has installed 5 Kyma teaching and production studios. In addition to teaching Kyma to his composition and sound design students at the University, Professor Stolet also directs the yearly Summer Academy on the UO campus where he welcomes international students and faculty for a two-week intensive course on digital audio, sound design and Kyma. Recently Stolet completed a book on Kyma, entitled Kyma and the SumOfSines Disco Club that is currently available in English and will soon be available in Chinese.

QUANTUM at CERN Open Days

QUANTUM at CERN Open Days. Photo by Gilles Jobin

Choreographer Gilles Jobin’s latest creation, QUANTUM, combines movement-generators and interaction algorithms inspired by the four fundamental forces, Kyma sounds based on collision events captured by the ATLAS experiment at CERN, and a kinetic light sculpture that explores resonance and forcing functions. An outgrowth of Jobin’s residency last year at CERN, QUANTUM is an example of what can happen when artists and scientists interact with one another, exchange ideas, and learn about each other’s work. One hundred meters above the beam line of the Large Hadron Collider, against the colorful back-drop of a photograph of the CMS detector, six dancers form and dissolve fluid patterns of vibration and heat, playful non-contact interactions, flowing across the stage like a Bose-Einstein condensate, and bouncing through a bubble chamber, carried along by spinning waves of quadraphonic sound, as lights careen in wave-like patterns above their heads.

You can see the piece performed again, this time in a theatre, from 4 – 8 November 2013 in Paris at New Settings #3 / Théâtre de la Cité Internationale – Paris – France

And again on 14 January 2014 at Bonlieu Scène nationale – in Annecy, France.

More details and credits on Gilles Jobin’s site.

A description in New Scientist magazine;

A review from Le Temps in Geneva;

A radio interview with Gilles Jobin on RTS with excerpt of music;

A preview from Le Courrier

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