Release – the eighth nerve

Sound design drives the narrative

Phaze UK sound designers — Rob Prynne, Matt Collinge & Alyn Sclosa along with Kyma consultant Alan M. Jackson — have been getting some well-deserved attention recently for their work on Ridley Scott’s film Gladiator II, work that has been shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination and a BAFTA.

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.

GLADIATOR II: Behind The Glorious Sound – with Matthew Collinge & Danny Sheehan

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.

Composer Oriol Graus Ribas Unveils his “Secrets”

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.

Composer Oriol Graus Ribas — 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!”

Percussion Robot

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.

The Light Moves Between

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:

“Flutter at the False Light”: vimeo.com/1009701215
“Kept in Banks and Vessels”: vimeo.com/1009700845

Specially created Dolby Atmos versions of all four tracks are available via Apple Music.

Kyma 7.43f6 features new Capytalk, new Sounds, faster app-switching

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.

Abecedarian

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: Color swatches, nonlinear mapping & more

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.

Thinking through sound — Ben Burtt and the voice of WALL-E

Ben Burtt was recently awarded the 2024 Vision Award Ticinomoda, which describes him as:

“Ben Burtt is a pioneer and visionary who has fundamentally changed the way we perceive sound in cinema.”

In this interview, Burtt shares some of his experiences as Sound Designer for several iconic films, including his discovery of “a kind of sophisticated music program called the Kyma” which he used in the creation of the voice of WALL-E.

The interviewer asked Ben about the incredible voices he created for WALL-E and EVA:

Well, Andrew Stanton who was the creator of the WALL-E character in the story; apparently he jokingly referred to his movie as the R2-D2 movie. He wanted to develop a very affable robot character that didn’t speak or had very limited speech that was mostly sound effects of its body moving and a few strange kind of vocals, and someone (his producer, I think — Jim Morris) said well why don’t you just talk to Ben Burtt, the guy who did R2-D2, so they got in touch with me.

Pixar is in the Bay Area (San Francisco) so it was nearby, and I went over and looked at about 10 minutes that Andrew Stanton had already put together with just still pictures — storyboards of the beginning of the film where WALL-E’s out on his daily work activities boxing up trash and so on and singing and playing his favorite music, and of course I was inspired by it and I thought well here’s a great challenge and I took it on.

This was a few months before they had to actually greenlight the project. I didn’t find this out until later but there was some doubt at that time about whether you could make a movie in which the main characters don’t really talk in any kind of elaborate way; they don’t use a lot of words. Would it sustain the audience’s interest? The original intention in the film that I started working on was that there was no spoken language in the film that you would understand at all; that was a goal at one point…

So I took a little bit of the R2 idea to come up with a voice where human performance would be part of it but it had to have other elements to it that made it seem electronic and machine-like. But WALL-E wasn’t going to Beep and Boop and Buzz like R2; it had to be different, so I struggled along trying different things for a few months and trying different voices — a few different character actors. And I often ended up experimenting on myself because I’m always available. You know it’s like the scientist in his lab takes the potion because there’s no one else around to test it: Jekyll and Hyde, I think that’s what it is. So I took the potion and and turned into Mr Hyde…

Photo from Comicon by Miguel Discart Bruxelles, Belgique This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

The idea was to always give the impression of what WALL-E was thinking through sound…

But eventually it ended up that I had a program — it was a kind of sophisticated music program called the Kyma and it had one sound in it — a process where it it would synthesize a voice but it [intentionally] didn’t do very well; the voice had artifacts that had funny distortions in it and extra noises. It didn’t work perfectly as a pure voice but I took advantage of the fact that the artifacts and mistakes in it were useful and interesting and could be used and I worked out a process where you could record sounds, starting with my own voice, and then process them a second time and do a re-performance where, as it plays back, you can stretch or compress or repitch the sounds in real time.

So you can take the word “Wall-E” and then you could make it have a sort of envelope of electronic noise around it; it gave it a texture that made it so it wasn’t human and that’s where it really worked. And of course it was in combination with the little motors in his arms and his head and his treads — everything was part of his expression.

The idea was to always give the impression of what WALL-E was thinking through sound — just as if you were playing a musical instrument and you wanted to make little phrases of music which indicated the feeling for what kind of communication was taking place.

Audience choice: SEAMUS 2023

You can hear Kyma sounds in two of the selections of Volume 33 of audience-selected works from the 2023 SEAMUS National Conference in New York City.

Composer Chi Wang describes her instrumentation in Transparent Affordance as a “data-driven instrument.” Data is derived from touching, titling, and rotating an iPad along with a “custom made box” of her own design. Near the end of the piece Wang uses the “box” to great effect. She places the iPad in the box and taps on the outside. Data is still transmitted to Kyma even without direct interaction, though the sounds are now generated in a much more sparse manner as though the iPad needs to rest or the performer decides to contain it. Finally the top is put on the box as one last flurry of sound escapes.

Scott L. Miller describes his piece Eidolon as “…a phantom film score I thought I heard on a transatlantic flight…” Although the film may not exist to guide us through a narrative, the soundtrack does exist and takes the place of visual storytelling. Eidolon, scored for flute, violin, clarinet, and percussion with Kyma, blurs the lines between what the performers are creating and what the electronic sounds are, an aspect of how we hear the world: we can alternately isolate and focus on sounds to identify them and we can also widen our ears to absorb a sonic texture or a soundscape. Electronic sounds were synthesized in Kyma using additive synthesis, mostly partials 17 – 32 of sub-audio fundamentals.

Willful Devices in Dublin

Composer Scott Miller’s Kyma control surface

Ecosystemics — the guiding principle for much of composer Scott L. Miller’s work over past two decades, constitutes an ecological approach to composition in which form is a dynamic process that is intimately tied to the ambience of the space in which the music occurs. In a live ecosystemic environment, Kyma Sounds are parametrically coupled with the environment via sound. As Miller explains in his two-part article for INSIGHTs magazine — Ecosystemic Programming and Composition:

In ecosystemic music, change in the sonic environment is continuously measured by Kyma with input from microphones. This change produces data that is mapped to control the production of sound. Environmental change may be instigated by performers, audience members, sound produced by the computer itself, and the ambience of the space(s) in general.

Sam Wells and Adam Vidiksis, collaborators on Miller’s new album of telematic ecosystemic music, Human Capital, describe performing with Miller’s Kyma environments as “like interacting with a living entity”.

On 2 August 2024, Scott will be joined by clarinetist Pat O’Keefe to perform as Willful Devices (a clarinet plus Kyma duo) at ClarinetFest in Dublin.

Collaborators since 2003, the duo’s name derives from the fact that both of them manipulate devices — one a clarinet, one a computer — to generate music. And that, despite their best efforts, these devices are never fully under their control, at times almost seeming to have a mind of their own. Rather than bemoaning this fact, Scott and Pat welcome the potential for unimagined sonic discoveries inherent in this unpredictability.

Friday’s setlist includes:

Piano – Forte I, Piano – Forte II, and Piano – Forte III telematic collaborations
Semai Seddi-Araban by Tanburi Cemil Bey, the premiere of the duo’s take on a classic Turkish semai.
Mirror Inside from Shape Shifting (2004), for clarinet and Kyma
Fragrance of Distant Sundays, the duo’s tribute to Carei Thomas, the Minneapolis improviser/composer who passed away in 2020