Nanophonic Similarities

What happens when you combine two unique and individualistic instruments (the Buchla 200 and Kyma) and one individualistic, experimental composer, fearlessly following the dictates of a bright and restless curiosity (Roland Kuit)?

Kuit’s new album, Nanophonic Similarities, is refreshingly raw and experimental.  It’s pure sound and the thrill of discovery!

Buchla 200 audio is used as a starting point, then algorithmically scrambled, granulated to create a new sono-language and rendered to the quadraphonic 24 bit Super Audio format.

Listen and order Nanophonic Similarities from the Donemus site.

Roland Emile Kuit = nanophonic similarities

Spectral eye of the Kyma guy

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Gustav Scholda, a.k.a. kymaguy, has just released an extensive set of spectral processing modules, sharing them with the Kyma community! The modules are free with an option to donate through PayPal if you’d like to support further development.

With names like FormantShifter, FractalNoise, PartialDerange, SpectralCentroid and many others, the Scholda modules are encapsulations of signal flows designed to analyze and process the output of live or recorded Kyma spectral sources.

Gustav is also available for private consulting, coaching, and custom module design to help you customize your own spectral processing ideas in Kyma.  In fact, he’s already posted the first of a series of tutorials on how to use his spectral modules: PitchShifting/Bending using the Product1 Module

NeverEngine Labsâ„¢ For Kyma Seven

Build your Kyma 7 mastery and increase your sources of creative inspiration by subscribing to NeverEngine Labs, Cristian Vogel‘s newly launched subscription service offering tools, resources, private instruction, and consulting opportunities designed to help enhance your Kyma 7 productivity and creativity.

NeverEngine Labs offers several “Labs”, each one focused on a different area of the Kyma 7 universe. The Labs are designed to inspire you with creative ideas for music composition and sound design as well expand your knowledge of the power and capabilities of the new Kyma 7.

These Labs are not fixed in function or design (like plug-ins or presets); instead, as a participant, you are encouraged to deconstruct and recombine the Sounds and their inner elements. Help is provided through live communication channels where you, Cristian and fellow subscribers can discuss the content of each Lab and receive regular updates with notes. Subscribing to a NeverEngine Lab is an invitation to engage in listening, curiosity and experimentation, all at your own pace!

Find out how Cristian can help you, your band, or your in-house team get the most from your Kyma system with custom-made workflows and designs.

To find out more about the labs and upcoming announcements, visit NeverEngine Labs.

Sci-fi communication sounds SFX Library

Tune in your shortwave radio and establish a comm link; Transmission Apparatus is Unidentified Sound Object’s new recombinant construction kit for creating a broad range of communication sounds, from real to “alien” broadcasting signals. The library contains more than 2 GB of data, delivered in 373 files of unique sound material, including radio samples, unintelligible voices and Kyma-synthesized noises.  Here’s an audio demo! 

Unidentified Sound Object is an independent sound effects libraries publisher offering high resolution sound effects and virtual instruments for film, games and music creations, launched by Matteo Milani in 2011. All of the audio files have been loudness-normalized, based on the recommendations of the European Broadcast Union, and embedded with metadata for detailed and accurate searches in your software asset management.

Becoming Polyphonic: Review of Cristian Vogel’s New Album

Ready to be transmogrified at the micro-cellular-level? Premised on the proposition “that we are what we hear,” Cristian Vogel’s new album Polyphonic Beings seeks to expose each of our cells to musical qualities that will effect the deepest possible transformations.

Cristian once again employs Kyma to achieve his signature far-afield timbral explorations, surprising tricky silences, and trance-inducing slow timbre morphs. Eminently danceable, Polyphonic Beings transports you through the imaginary landscapes depicted in the cover art and deposits you safely in the serenely peaceful state evoked by the Society of Hands.

  1. Exclusion Waves: The pilgrimage begins with pink noise waves breaking gently onto an indigo shore, with vocal-chants enfolded in the noise.
  2. Mccaw’s ghost: Slow and easy, runs out of steam punk at the end
  3. How many grapes went into that wine: Here, Vogel is in his element: pitchy cross-synth rhythms and his signature metric modulations paired with crazy pitch unwindings! Trance-inducing vocalesque timbres ride rhythmic spirals and a sudden break leaves you catching your breath to a humorous chorus of squeegee “la-la-las” that morph into synths.
  4. Lost in the chase: Lovely liquidy sounds like hitting an open-mouth tube (or modal filters?) establish an ostinato  pattern that change every 8 bars until a gorgeous smooth disintegration into gentle noise & silence.  But wait, there’s more!  An over-the-top metallic plate reverb with metallic hits finishes out the track.
  5. La Banshee 109: (or is it LA Banshee?) Sounds of metal rigging wiggling in a stiff breeze and trying hard to settle into a groove.  It finally settles into a liquid pattern as reverse attack brass-like timbres create a heart beat pulse which evolves into conga-like plucky patterns with unstable frequency swoops.  Once again a lovely dissolve and disintegration.
  6. Forest Gifts: One thing about the forest is, it’s full of insects!  A delightful buzzy buggy intro blurs and then comes into focus as a fast groove of buzzy shakers with an overlay of creatures encoded into the northern lights and luxurious harmonic sweeps. Filtered noise, like distant boat horns, peacefully resolves into a misty forest dawn with delicate violin tremolo.
  7. Society of hands: Exquisite slow machine room gradually morphing into an icy wind rattling the vents, against slow delicate piano chords with reversals gradually working their way from high to low. Landing in a raspy Japanese vocal and peaceful filtery suspensions.  You’re left feeling serene and elevated.

Order online and then get your tickets for the 22 November launch party in Berlin. (with Vogel and SØS on the bill, prepare yourself for a transformative experience).

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Kyma transforms Lucy

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!”

Roland Kuit in Stockholm, New York, Edinburgh

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.

Kyma Spectum Editor in Tesseract Portal Device

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.

Moved by magnets

SGR^CAV is a collaboration between composers Cristian Vogel and SØS Gunver Ryberg, exploring a phase space of possible musics, where phantasmagorical sound objects emerge from transient combinations of multi-dimensional parameters.

In January 2014 the duo SGR^CAV released their debut recording MOVED BY MAGNETS on the cassette label Tapeworm.

These works for cassette were composed from the precise arrangement of a number of elements—such as field recordings of coal  mining machinery in the arctic mountains, and the creaking of ancient trees in Denmark—combined with digital processing—such as self-similar additive synthesis and granulations—all developed in Kyma. Many of the other characteristic timbres were created using vintage studio technology. An awareness of the sonic qualities of the compact cassette medium was also an important factor in the composition.

Listening to the album feels like exploring a mysterious world with its own, alien yet self-consistent, laws of physics with faint echoes from the Columbia-Princeton Music Center of the 1960s.