Category: Play

The Sound of Schrödinger

Stephen Taylor and four other musicians from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will be using Kyma as part of the incidental music for a performance of Quantum Voyages at the American Physical Society annual meeting in Anaheim, California, 15 March 2025.

Smitha Vishveshwara, Latrelle Bright, Stephen Taylor are CASCaDe (Collective for Arts-Science, Creativity and Discovery, etc)

In the play Quantum Voyages, by Smitha Vishveshwara and Latrelle Bright, two voyagers enter the microscopic realm of atomic landscapes and quantum conundrums and, guided by Sapienza, discover a magnificent and baffling world where they confront terrifying prospects of being Dead and Alive at the same time, glide through diaphanous orbitals of atoms, levitate above superconducting surfaces, and precess through Magnetic Resonant Imaging machines. Finally they emerge, awakened to the microworlds within us and the affirmation that things are never what they seem.

Live incidental music will be performed by:

  • Stephen Taylor: keyboards and Kyma
  • Xavier Davenport: spinductor* and guitar
  • Na’ilah Ali: electric violin
  • Jason Finkelman: percussion
  • Jake Metz: mixing and sound design

Kyma is used for generating complex spectra and other sounds to represent the Schroedinger equation and for work with extended tuning systems. The premiere will be in Anaheim on 15 March 2025, with a second performance at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois on 19 April 2025.

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* The Spinductor is an instrument that sends OSC messages to Kyma and was created  by Xavier Davenport

Just Call Me God!

In Just Call Me God! John Malkovich plays a megalomaniacal dictator teetering on the brink of madness in a one-man show exploring the idea that absolute power corrupts absolutely.


Martin Haselböck (organ) and Franz Danksagmüeller (composer/organist, LinnStrument and Kyma processing) — respond to Malkovich’s words with music by Bach, Wagner and Schubert — in a confrontation of words against music. At one point, Danksagmüller even uses Kyma to merge the voice of Malkovich with the timbre of the organ, allowing the actor to speak with the voice of a mighty pipe organ — every power-mad dictator’s dream!

On tour this spring in Europe and Russia, the group is arranging bring their message to a worldwide audience early in 2018.

08-10 March 2017
Hamburg, Elbphilharmonie

12-13 March 2017
Vienna, Konzerthaus

15 March 2017
Amsterdam, Concertgebouw

18 March 2017
Groningen, De Oosterport

21 March 2017
Birmingham, Symphony Hall

23-25 March 2017
London, Union Chapel

28 March 2017
Luxembourg, Philharmonie

2 April 2017
Moscow, House of Music

4 April 2017
Budapest, Palace of Arts

9 April, 2017
Munich, Residenztheater

TMIE — mediating the inner and outer sound worlds

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Carlos Alberto Augusto’s new opera “TMIE, on the threshold of the outside world” just had a successful premiere in Lisbon on Thursday September 8th, 2016, at the O’culto da Ajuda; so successful in fact, that they added two additional performances! Apparently, the sound quality of the 10-track Kyma-generated score also attracted attention and appreciation from composers in the audience.

The 51 minute work was entirely composed in Kyma and is dedicated to Portuguese soprano Marina Pacheco who performs three roles over the course of the opera — Meretseger, who loves silence; Selene, who drives her silver chariot through the skies and vibrates to the beats of the stars; and Corypheaus who listens and tries to interpret their dialog.

The TMIE gene (Transmembrane Inner Ear) is implicated in the development of the cochlea and in the synthesis of a protein that mediates between the outer acoustic environment and the inner sound world of the auditory nerve and the auditory cortex of the brain; in the opera, TMIE serves as a metaphor for the interface between the inner and outer self.

For more details and contact information on how to program this work, please see Augusto’s fascinating program notes and news site.

Sound design for Brecht in Porto

Sound designer Luis Aly utilized Kyma to spatialize the sound for a 13-27 September 2013 production of Brecht’s Die Geschäfte des Herrn Julius Caesar (The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar) at the National Theatre of Porto in Portugal.

To create the space, Aly routed eight Kyma outputs across 26 Meyer Sound speakers grouped as: Front of House (10 speakers), Surround House (10 speakers) and Back of Stage (4 speakers) and Inside Stage (2 speakers). The ten actors and live musicians (voice, violin, custom electric guitar and electronics) were all miked and their inputs were mixed in a Midas Heritage 2000 mixing desk, sent to Kyma, and spread in space using reverberation and delay algorithms.

According to Aly, “..with only a few parameters I could move the space, stretch it, shrink it, delay it…Kyma it!!! For a sound designer it’s a dream come true. In this process I thought of what I wanted, realized it very efficiently in Kyma, and the results were amazing!”

Post apocalyptic LA hyper-opera

 

Composer/sound designer Phil Curtis is using Kyma to provide electronics and sound design for a new production of composer Anne LeBaron‘s opera, Crescent City, directed by Yuval Sharon and performed from 10-27 May 2012 at The Industry in Los Angeles.  Described by LA Times critic Mark Swed as a “darkly mysterious, troubling yet weirdly exuberant and wonderfully performed new opera,” the production is a meta-collaboration that includes six visual artists who were asked to build installations for the sets (shack, cemetery, junk heap, swamp, hospital and dive bar) in the Industry’s large warehouse-like space.  Variously priced tickets determine where you, the audience member, gets to sit (or roam), and the espresso bar has been deemed outstanding.

Curtis is using Kyma to spatialize sounds in the vast performance space and to create a swamp ambience at the climax of the opera as the Voodoo queen and healer Marie Laveau sings one final invocation and is swallowed up by the sounds of the swamp.

Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, the libretto metaphorically examines the way people deal with disaster and post-apocalyptic scenarios, including nurses, Voodoo, and Loa. As Swed enthusiastically concludes: “We now have something that can genuinely be called L.A. opera.”

 

Lulu at the Berliner Ensemble Theater

Composer/performer Sarth Calhoun is directing rehearsals of  Lou Reed‘s music for Frank Wedekind‘s Lulu directed by Robert Wilson at the Berliner Ensemble theater in Berlin. The score features Kyma processing, Continuum/Kyma playing, and dual Continuum fingerboard improvisations accompanied by a live string section.  Lulu, which depicts a society “riven by the demands of lust and greed” (and which became the basis for both Alban Berg’s opera and Pabst’s silent film Pandora’s Box) opens 11 April 2011 in Berlin.