Out of the fire, into the Kyma consultancy

 Broadcast / Webcast, Film Score, Sound Design, Sound for picture  Comments Off on Out of the fire, into the Kyma consultancy
Sep 162023
 

It’s not every day that a consultant/teacher gets a closing screen credit on a Netflix hit series, but check out this screenshot from the end of Witcher E7: Out of the Fire, into the Frying Pan:

Screenshot of the closing credits for Witcher E7 crediting sound designers from Phaze UK and Alan Jackson, Kyma consultancy

Kyma consultant, Alan M. Jackson has been working with sound designers Matt Collinge, Rob Prynne and Alyn Sclosa from Phaze UK for a while now, and the students surprised their sensei with an end credit on The Witcher

Kyma Consultancy – Alan M Jackson

Alan and his small band of sound designers meet regularly to share screens and help each other solve sound design challenges during hands-on sessions that last from 1-2 hours. Not only are these sessions an opportunity to deepen Kyma knowledge; they’re also an excuse to bring the sound design team together and share ideas. Alan views his role as a mentor or moderator, insisting that the sound designers do the hands-on Kyma work themselves.

There’s no syllabus; it’s the sound designers who set the agenda for each class, sometimes aiming to solve a specific problem, but more often, they aim to come up with a general solution to a situation that comes up repeatedly. They’ve taken to calling these solutions “little Kyma machines” that will generate an effect for them, not just for this project but for future projects as well. Over time, they’ve created several, reusable, custom “machines”, among them: ‘warping performer’, ‘doppler flanger’, ‘density stomp generator’, and ‘whisper wind’.

Rob Prynne is particularly enamored of a custom patch based on the “CrossFilter” module in Kyma (based on an original design by Pete Johnston), sometimes enhanced by one of Cristian Vogel’s NeverEngine formant-shifting patches. In an interview with A Sound Effect, Rob explains, “It’s like a convolution reverb but with random changes to the length and pitch of the impulse response computed in real-time. It gives a really interesting movement to the sound.” According to the interview, it was the tripping sequence in episode 7 where the CrossFilter really came into play.

When asked if there are any unique challenges posed by sound design, Alan observes, “The big things to note about sound design, particularly for TV / Film, is that it’s usually done quickly, there’s lots of it, you’re doing it at the instruction of a director; the director wants ‘something’ but isn’t necessarily nuanced in being able to talk about sound.”

A further challenge is that the sounds must “simultaneously sound ‘right’ for the audience while also being new or exciting. And the things that sound ‘right’, like the grammar of film editing, are based on a historically constructed sense of rightness, not physics.”

Alan summarizes the main advantages of Kyma for sound designers as: sound quality, workflow, originality, and suitability for working in teams. In what way does Kyma support “teams”?

With other sound design software and plugins you can get into all sorts of versioning and compatibility issues. A setup that’s working fine on my computer might not work on a teammate’s. Kyma is a much more reliable environment. A Sound that runs on my Paca[(rana | mara)] is going to work on yours.

Even more important for professional sound design is “originality”:

Kyma sounds different from “all the same VST plugins everyone else is using”. This is an important factor for film / TV sound designers. They need to produce sounds that meet the brief of the director but also sound fresh, exciting, new and different from everyone else. Using Kyma is their secret advantage. They are not using the same Creature Voice plugins everyone else is using but instead creating a Sound from scratch comes up with results unique to their studio.

For Witcher fans, the sound designers have provided a short cue list of examples for your listening pleasure:

Kyma Sound Heard Episode
Warping performer on every creature in every episode
Warping performer on portal sounds and magic S3E03
Warping performer on the wild hunt vapour S3E03
Doppler flanger spinning thing on the ring of fire S3E05 / S3E06
Density stomp generator for group dancing S3E05
Whisper wind convolved vocal for wild hunt S3E03

 

Visit Alan Jackson’s SpeakersOnStrings to request an invitation to the Kyma Kata — a (free) weekly Zoom-based peer-learning study group. Alan also offers individual and group Kyma coaching, teaching and mentoring.

Kyma gives voice to Tarantino’s “Hateful Eight” Blizzard

 Film, Film Score, Interview, Release, Sound Design, Sound for picture  Comments Off on Kyma gives voice to Tarantino’s “Hateful Eight” Blizzard
Feb 132016
 


Audio engineer Jennifer Walden provides a fascinating analysis of the sound design in Quentin Tarantino’s Hateful Eight in a recent issue of Randi Altman’s postPerspective.

Tarantino is “truly an aural enthusiast and very much a sculptor of his cinema through the use of sound and music,” according to his longtime supervising sound editor, Wylie Stateman, who continues,

Sound is a major contributor to Quentin’s films and often the secret sauce that makes the meal just gel and come together as a coherent recognizable work…

Wylie Stateman, Supervising Sound Editor on Hateful Eight

 

Audio is very different from the other filmmaking aspects… Audio is very mysterious — a force that is just truly present in the moment. It’s just a vibration in the room. It’s something that the audience experiences but can’t see and can’t touch. It’s a different kind of art form, and as an audio artist I love working for Quentin because he is so particular and he values the contribution that sound makes to the experience of watching his film.

Sylvain Lasseur created & performed the voice of the blizzard

Tarantino is fascinated with the sounds of the actors’ voices and he wanted the ninth adversary in the film, the blizzard, to have its own character and its own unique ‘voice’. For that challenge, Stateman and co-supervising sound editor Harry Cohen called in sound designer Sylvain Lasseur. Sylvain brought in his Continuum fingerboard and Kyma / Pacarana system and set to work creating the voice of the blizzard.

Using Kyma and the Continuum, Lasseur was able to perform multiple layers of wind sounds to picture. They built the blizzard literally one gust, one whistle and one whisp at a time, designing the wind to complement the dialog and the picture editing in a unique way. According to Stateman, using Kyma, Lasseur was able to create an “instrument” on which he could perform the voice of the blizzard.

The first step was to create a guide track based around the dialog; then they modeled other sounds around that guide track. Stateman describes how they composed the sound design in an almost musical way:

So let’s say we have a base sound of a blizzard, we could then, very selectively, model wind wisps or rumbles or anything else against it. The Kyma would shape the other samples in time relative to the control track. Once we have them all modeled against each other we can start to pull them apart a little bit so that each element can have its own dynamic moment. It becomes more like a parade and you hear the low, the mid and the high — not on top of each other but offset from each other. The artistry comes in turning samples into instruments.

The importance of sound to Tarantino is evident in the fact that Lasseur ended up spending four months creating the instruments in Kyma and another four months performing and shaping the voice of the blizzard around the dialog and visuals.

For more insights on the sound for Hateful Eight, check out Jennifer Walden’s full article: Wyle Stateman Talks Sound Editing on ‘The Hateful Eight’

Sessionview 9 @ STEIM

 Event, Film Score, Learning, Seminar, Sound for picture  Comments Off on Sessionview 9 @ STEIM
Oct 042015
 

Roland Kuit and filmmaker Karin Schomaker were at STEIM on 4 September to present Patterns as an articulated language. Recently, Kuit has been intertwining synthesizers and Kyma, recently it was the Buchla and this time it was Kyma/NMG2.

A little night music

 Concert, Event, Film, Film Score, Sound for picture  Comments Off on A little night music
Oct 022015
 

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A Little Night Music is an evening of Visualized Music—films composed to music (rather than music composed for films) featuring videos by Roxanne Rea in collaboration with composers Bill Rea, Debra Kaye, and the owner of Kyma system serial number 1: Dick Robinson!

Sycamore Place Gallery

120 Sycamore Place
Decatur GA 30030

October 10, 2015
at 8:30 p.m.

Suggested Donation $15

Mar 172015
 

In Reimagined : Synthesized Soundscapes of California, sound artist Micah Frank re-imagines the parched landscape of drought-striken California through field recordings collected on site and then spectrally dissected, manipulated and resynthesized through additive, granular and filter bank resynthesis in Kyma 7.

 

Through a combination of low rainfall and high temperatures, California is experiencing its worst drought in 1200 years. From September through October 2014, Micah Frank embarked on a soundscape ecology project to create a sonic profile of California parks, their biophonies and geophonies. But to his surprise, each park he visited was like a ghost world. Although he was able to capture geophonic sounds like wind and rain, there were almost no biophonic sounds of birds or other animals.

His starkly reimagined soundscape was generated entirely from the field recordings processed through spectral analysis and resynthesis.

EZUFFPP#6 Film Festival in New York

 Concert, Event, Festival, Film Score, Sound for picture, Video  Comments Off on EZUFFPP#6 Film Festival in New York
Mar 112015
 

opus caementiciumOpus Caementicium, a short, abstract cinematic ode to concrète by Karin Schomaker with a Kyma generated score by Roland Kuit will be screened in New York on March 13, 2015 at EZUFFPP#6 NY— a festival bridging experimental architecture, experimental film, and experimental music at Spectrum Space in NYC.

Described as “an experience of form, light, surface, sound and movement,” Opus Caementicium is “an attempt to transcend the mere material.” For the soundtrack, Kuit uses the Slipstick synthesis module to create pulses that are frequency modulated and fed into a Resonator Bank. These reflections of sound are then Time/Frequency shaped to create a beautiful concrete sound/music environment.

EZUFF is different kind of film festival that spans objective and subjective realms and bridges gaps among different scholarly traditions. They see horizons not boundaries. EZUFF is a ‘projectivist’ project playing with ideas of:

  • the projection of moving images – the film medium
  • the idea that the projections of moving image could be related to (or used as a pretext to address) actual & future ‘projections’ of the city/urban life

Using short experimental movies to make a link between contemporary urban forms of expression/representation and the political imagination for the city of today, EZUFF is about oblique ways to dig into present day urban cultures and imagine alternatives for the cities of tomorrow

Phantom of the opera

 Concert, Event, Film Score  Comments Off on Phantom of the opera
Jun 122014
 

In celebration of Friday the thirteenth, Franz Danksagmüller and friends will perform a live sound track for the 1925 silent film The Phantom of the Opera in the Concert Hall of the Musikhochschule Lübeck (MHL).

Stummfilmprojekt

Organ, harmonium, and soprano (all three processed through Kyma), piano, percussion, and the haunting sounds of the Gullyphone (Danksagmüller’s own invention, now complete with black light LEDs!) will all be contributing to the mysterious and dramatic live soundscape.

Friday the thirteenth of June 2014 at 8 pm in Lübeck at the MHL Großer Saal.

StummfilmprojektStummfilmprojekt

Stummfilmprojekt

Feb 172014
 

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

National Illusion

 Film, Film Score, Release, Sound Design, Sound for picture, Sport  Comments Off on National Illusion
Feb 092014
 

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.

Oct 252013
 

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.”

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