Sound designer Javier Umpierrez has two sound-intensive films coming out this month and next.
Olallo Rubio’s Tormento stars Natalia Solián as an exhausted security guard with some guilty secrets on her first day on the job covering the graveyard shift at the morgue — what could go wrong?
Umpierrez’ sound design for the Tormento trailer is terrifying! He builds and builds and builds to a climax when it suddenly goes silent! Followed by a strangely disembodied closeup of Solián’s scream. Opens on 13 November 2025 only in cinemas.
Javier writes:
Tormento doesn’t have a lot of dialogue, so I had a lot of space to have fun with sound design. There are a lot of dissonant and tonal sounds, practically a score, and all the sounds were generated with Kyma. So fun to work with Kyma like this, a lot of density and grit , the director is beyond happy with the results.
In his trailer for Depeche Mode M, Umpierriez captures the insane excitement of a live DM show, the sounds of the massive crowd, and the music. Reach out, touch me! Dance is the cure.
Directed by Fernando Frías, the film captures Depeche Mode’s 2023 Memento Mori tour and the three sold-out shows in Mexico City attended by over 200,000 fans. DEPECHE MODE: Mdelves into the profound connections between music, pain, memory, joy, and dance.
Limited screenings begin on 28 October 2025 in cinemas and IMAX.
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.
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:
“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.
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.
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!
A few months ago, sound designer Gurwal Coïc-Gallas got a call from sound superviser Guillaume Bouchateau asking him to join the team for Luc Besson’s latest project, Lucy. Gurwal was tasked with creating sound design libraries that the editors could draw upon when creating the special effects. In particular, Gurwal was asked to focus on:
Organic cellular movement (when Scarlet Johansson’s body is transforming)
Electromagnetic fields (because she can see electromagnetic fields) and
Voice effects (on her thoughts)
Gurwal used Kyma cross-synthesis on all the sounds and is enthusiastic about the results: “The movie is great, huge, surprising, probably one of Besson’s best, and the soundtrack is amazing!”
Composer/researcher/sound designer Roland Kuit is currently composer-in-residence at the EMS in Stockholm working on a project that combines their Buchla 400 with Kuit’s Kyma/Pacarana system.
He is also at work creating new pieces for Pacarana and Chicago based composer/conductor Renee Baker‘s Chicago Symfonietta to be premiered in New York this fall, and you can hear him lecture on modular sound design for TV and games the Napier University in Edinburgh in February 2015.  Check out his full calendar here.
Sound designer François Blaignan had an opportunity to apply Kyma in an unusual way in his work on the interactive multimedia exhibition Marvel’s Avengers STATION (Science Training and Tactical Intelligence Operative Network) now on display in Time Square in NYC and featured in this month’s Mix magazine. The 10,000-square-foot installation is a space where Avengers fans can immerse themselves in characters and artifacts associated with the Avengers.
 For the Tesseract Portal Device, the installation designers were having a hard time matching the look of the spectrograms of X-rays, infrared, and gamma rays provided to them by NASA.  So Blaignan created an animation using stills from Kyma’s spectrum editor and synched it to the Tessaract sound from the movie for a perfect match.
Kyma wasn’t a totally silent partner on the project; it also played a role in creating the sounds of the particle accelerator in Banner’s lab.
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.
Sound designer 