R U I S is one of several pieces that have emerged from Kuit’s years of research conducted with Kyma on the phenomenon of noise.
Part of a cycle interpreting our increasingly complex world of information, RUIS explores collisions, dialogs, interplay, patterns, spreading, merging — sometimes the noise is even pulled loose and spread into ticks in the twelve-meter-wide horizontal panorama, each tap shifting in space as an audio object.
A study in spaciousness and complexity, frequencies are stacked or moved through the space, sometimes configured in a static distribution, while at other times as pseudo-chaotic movements. Each loudspeaker can serve either as an autonomous sound object or as an intrinsic part of the whole.
Likewise, the listener can take a seat or move through the room, receiving continuously changing reflective angles of incidence at the ears.
Anne notes that Cork is “very patient music” compared to her other collaborations, primarily because Phil is a drone artist. She provided a time-stamped guide to the Kyma effects to listen for in each track:
Cuan an Chaislean, Phil on drones
0.00 Granular Reverb
4.45 Very soft Formant shifting, with changing settings for dissonance & pitch
6.40 The formant shifting is more audible
10.01 Random gating using the chopper with changing settings
Going through a Granular Reverb in different presets
17.12 Random chopper gating with a much different Granular Reverb setting
Cork, Phil on drones
0.29 Granular reverb using short grains on flute noise / airy timbre
5.59 Kyma – ‘Cathedral’ abstract melody – sine tones mixed with changing noise
Random envelopes, speeds, Continued Granular reverb flute
8.01 Flute multiphonics start to enter still using the Granular reverb
Maureen’s, Phil on drone and occasional noise interruptions
0.00 Piccolo – Non-harmonic analysis with delays through Spectral Modification triggering an OscillatorBank – A sound I call Scram
Whistle tones, multiphonics, airy pitches
9.45 Piccolo with a waveshaper and highpass filter – a sound I call Glitch – with Reverb
11.46 Piccolo with Glitch, delay and a fat long reverb
14.00 The other sounds are Phil’s
16.00 Piccolo circular breathing through the Glitch, delay and long reverb
17.18 Whistle tones plus airy piccolo tones through the same processing
Of Threw, Thru & Through, Anne writes: “These tracks are from an afternoon of play in the studio. Overdubs by Suzana Lașcu came a few years later when we decided to release our pre-pandemic wildness.”
Alan M. Jackson has pledged to share the proceeds from his new track Mediation One in a 50/50 split with his musical collaborators: a choir of birds from his West Sussex garden and another from the South Downs. (The birds’ half of the money goes toward the purchase of high quality RSPB bird food.)
Meditation One (feat. NATURE) features Alan M Jackson on fujara, gong, and modular bells accompanied by West Sussex peri-urban birds (the first bird choir) and the Birds of the South Downs (second bird choir).
Alan’s performance is processed through the Kyma CrossFilter with a “wintry” impulse response: several years ago, he brought a field recorder along on a skiing trip in the French Alps where he captured people skiing past, around and down the slope of some scratchy sounding hard-pack snow which became the impulse response for this spring (as in the season) reverberation.
The “first choir” of birds was recorded from Alan’s studio window (he had to EQ away the traffic noise). He decided to perform outdoors along with this track on a local iron-age hill fort. While he was was mixing, he noticed that the birds around him were impressively louder and clearer than the first choir, so he stopped and set up his mics to record them. But by the time he was ready they’d gone quiet. That’s when he realized that the birds had been reacting to hearing the recording of the first choir (probably in a “stressed out, territorial, get-off-my-hill, kind of way”). So he alternated between playing short sections of the first bird choir, then stopping to record the second choir’s reactions.
The cover art comes from a water color painted by Alan on top of the same hill at sunset during the planetary alignment (the white dot is Venus). It’s an hour hike down from the top so staying to paint the sunset meant he had to stumble back in the dark (that part is not depicted in the painting).
In the 6 January 2025 ToneBenders sound design podcast, Timothy Muirhead and the sound team delve into the details of how sound design guides audience sentiment during each of the gladiatorial contests — with the “crowd sound” taking on a role typically served by the musical score.
Director Scott’s challenge to the sound team was that the crowd itself should function as a major character in the film — telling the story of the rise and fall of each of the other characters — and symbolizing the fall of Rome as the populace loses faith in the emperors.
“So much detail and effort went into making the crowd reactions in the Roman Colosseum…narrate the emotions of the battles”
During the podcast, the sound team — Paul Massey (Dialog/Music Re-Recording Mixer), Danny Sheehan (Supervising Sound Editor), Matt Collinge (Supervising Sound Editor & SFX/Foley Re-Recording Mixer) and Stéphane Bucher (Production Sound Mixer) recount their unusual approach of including the post-production team in the production phase so they could coordinate their efforts. This gave the post-production sound designers an opportunity to “direct” the crowd extras and to ensure that they could capture the raw material needed for post production crowd-enlargement.
In an IBC behind-the-scenes article, supervising sound editors Matthew Collinge and Danny Sheehan (co-founders of Phaze UK) describe how they generated the sound of 10,000 spectators by layering the sound of extras on the set with recordings of cheers and jeers from bullfights, cricket matches, rugby and baseball games and then “…transformed them into a cohesive roar using a Kyma workstation,” according to Sheehan.
During an interview with A Sound Effect, Matthew Collinge describes the sound design for the gladiatorial contests involving animals: “We manipulated actual animal sounds to highlight their aggression and power. For the baboons, we morphed chimp calls and then combined them with the screeches of other animals to create a unique and very intimidating sound.”
In that same interview, Collinge describes how Rob Prynne and the team enhanced the sounds of the arrow trajectories:
Rob Prynne used these recordings to model a patch in the Kyma where we took the amplitude variation between the L and the R in the recordings and used this to create an algorithm that we could apply to other samples. We then mixed in animal and human screams and screeches which had their pitch mapped to this algorithm and made it feel as one with the original recordings.
When you see Gladiator II — whether in a theatre or via your favorite streaming service — you’ll be rewarded with a bit of extra information if you stick with it through the closing credits!
Sound design & Kyma Consultancy credits. Photo submitted by an anonymous movie-goer who patiently sat through the end credits.
With a multidisciplinary background spanning industrial engineering, flamenco and classical guitar, music composition, and electronic music, award-winning composer/guitarist Oriol Graus Ribas composes for a wide range of instruments, multimedia, electronically-transformed acoustic instruments, and electroacoustic multifocal diffusion arrays.
Between 2014 and 2022, Graus Ribas embarked on a period of creative exploration, recording several improvisations in which he intentionally limited himself to a restricted set of pitches. In 2024, he selected the best of those recordings for further development and compiled them into a new album: Secrets — a serene, reflective soundtrack for introspection and contemplation as the new year begins to reveal its secrets.
Material for Secrets comes from an electric guitar stripped of any sound processing. Gradually, the sound of the guitar becomes inaudible as it is routed through Kyma modifications, primarily the CrossFilter and SampleCloud. Graus Ribas employs a pedalboard to dynamically navigate the flow between the raw and Kyma-processed sounds.
Oriol Graus Ribas (Photo by Alba Espot)
Reflecting on his creative process, Graus Ribas writes, “Working with Kyma-Pacamara allows me to dedicate my time entirely to the music itself!”
Ping Pong Percussion represents a new, hybrid art form created by experimental composer / visual artist, Giuseppe Tamborrino and featuring a robotic instrument that he designed and built.
Part robot, part sound sculpture, part musical composition, part video art — Ping Pong Percussion Experimental Sampling with Wifi Servo Motor & Live Granular Synthesis. Laterza (TA) 2024-10-6 blends robotically-actuated acoustic percussion sounds with live Kyma granular synthesis and leads the viewer on a path from real world to imaginary visuals.
Giuseppe Tamborrino’s Wi-Fi servo motor-controlled sound sculpture
In his compositions, Laterza-based composer Giuseppe Tamborrino combines jazz scales, Greek modes and personalized scales with partially tonal, tonal and non-tonal timbres, blended with instrumental acoustic effects. Each work takes a different form, some are stochastically shaped, others reflect the golden section, others take on algorithmic structures experimentally generated by custom software for computer music and sound.
Portland-based multimedia artist William Selman’s 8 November 2024 album, The Light Moves Between, poses the question: “Can scenes from the Pacific Northwest of America connect us to entities in distant universes, or are we listening to William’s unique processing of his own surroundings?”
Various Kyma techniques can be heard on each track, with cross-synthesis emerging as Selman’s personal favorite. Here are a few details you can listen for on the album:
“Outshone the Sun”
Sunspots are caused by intense magnetic fields emerging from the interior. Image created by NASA.
Inspired by sunspots and electromagnetic interference reminiscent of the sounds of popping air bubbles that barnacles make during low tide, Selman used a frequency shifter in Kyma to modulate the Serge New Timbral Oscillator for the sharp droning tones near the beginning to match the character of the shortwave radio sounds. Much of the bed of textures in the second half of the piece is made by cross-filtering field recordings of barnacles against shortwave radio recordings.
“Kept in Banks and Vessels”
For the triangle and singing bowl sounds, Selman designed a Jaap-Vink-inspired feedback Sound in Kyma to create the drones. For the final section, he cross-filtered Serge sounds with frog sounds that he recorded in Hawaii. The warbly animal call sounds are made in Kyma with an Oscillator and a LossyIntegrator.
“Flutter at the False Light”
Here you can hear a Kyma frequency shifter modulating various electromagnetic field recordings made near the composer’s house. The bed of textures for the ambience are cross-filtered sounds from recordings made with contact mics in his studio space and on his windows.
“New Topographics”
The last track was inspired by American landscape photographers and photos of empty, non-places primarily in the American West. Selman recorded sounds such as birds, wind storms, electrical lines, and water wells in the Central Oregon high desert. He used a cross filter patch made by Pete Johnston and Alan Jackson during the Kyma Kata sessions, which he finds particularly useful for creating a stream of sounds that flow seamlessly from one into another. Other instrumental elements include a Serge synthesizer, organ, and bowed (and hit) vibraphone.
The Light Moves Between represents Selman’s return to visual work following a long hiatus — this time around, he is bringing his visuals together with his sound work. The first three tracks on the album were written to accompany three short films. Although the first one (“Outshone the Sun”) has been set aside, the second and third pieces are complete and can be viewed on Vimeo:
The latest Kyma 7 software update introduces new Sounds and Capytalk expressions to enhance the versatility of file-based, time-indexed sound design, 130x faster app switching, and more!
Kyma 7.43f6, released 3 October 2024, delivers a 130x speed-up in inter-application switching on macOS and Windows computers — a dramatic performance boost to smooth out your workflow and enhance your productivity.
In addition to the speed-up, this update introduces two new Capytalk expressions for ramp functions with loop points, providing greater flexibility and control over live Sound parameters.
Two new Sounds — TimeIndexForSamples with a Frequency (rather than Rate) field to control the playback speed of a sample selected from a list of sample file names and TimeIndexForFileNames which can select from among multiple FileNames — enhance the versatility of file-based, time-indexed sound design (including samples, PSI analyses, spectral analyses, sampleClouds).
Check the Prototypes for examples using these new Sounds:
SampleWithTimeIndex !Frequency
SampleWithTimeIndex !Rate
MultiSampleWithTimeIndex !Rate
MultiSampleWithTimeIndex !KeyPitch
Non-harmonic MultiSpectrum with TimeIndex
Kyma 7.43f6 also includes a host of other improvements and feature requests, all designed to make your sound design experience ever more enjoyable.
Unlock all the speed and other enhancements by downloading the new version from the Help menu in Kyma 7 today.
Inspired by an ABCs of Physics board book he bought for his son at Powell’s in Portland, University of Oregon professor Jon Bellona became convinced that kids’ books should be for both kids and their parents.
Bellona’s new book ABCs of Audio Recording is an alphabet concept book for kids and their parents to learn more about audio production through straight-forward concepts, definitions, and images. [ed., my favorite entry is “Z for impedance”]
Dedicated to his sons, Peregrine and Ellery, Jon Bellona’s ABCs of Audio Recording is ideal for the children in your life (and the child in you).
Kyma 7.43f5 is here, and it’s packed with new features for customizing your Kyma environment and enhancements to optimize your realtime sound design experience.
Kyma 7.43f5 is here, and it’s packed with new features for customizing your Kyma environment and enhancements to optimize your realtime sound design experience.
Highlights:
• Personalize your Workspace: Choose from a variety of default background colors and widgets for your Virtual Control Surface to create a more personalized and comfortable work environment.
• Enhanced Color Selection: Color swatches guide your selection process, making it easier to find the perfect color combinations
• Smoother Performance: Enjoy smoother and more responsive screen updates.
New Features:
• Capytalk for Non-Linear Lookups: Perform complex non-linear lookups into arrays of changing EventValues, unlocking new possibilities for interactive control over Kyma Sound parameters
• Improved Interpolation for Capytalk intoXArray:yArray: Continuously variable interpolation methods offer greater flexibility and control over how values are mapped between points — from immediate, to linear, to piecewise spline interpolation
• Shared Files: Manage file references within your Kyma Sounds using SharedFileName and SharedFileNames. These new Sounds streamline your workflow by replacing all occurrences of file variables with your chosen file selections.
Additional Enhancements:
• Improved InputOutputCharacteristic for Pacamara Ristretto: This Sound has been rewritten for enhanced efficiency, accuracy, and piecewise spline interpolation.
• Inspiring new Samples and Images: Spark your creativity with a fresh set of samples and images provided by composer/performer Andrea Young and astrophotographer/sound designer Rick Stevenson.
…and more!
Download the update today to unlock the full potential of your Kyma-Pacamara sound design environment! Available free from the Help menu in Kyma.
