Is it a graphic novel? AÂ concept album? An animation? An App? AÂ book?
The Book of Sarth is all of these things plus a narrative about an ear worm that is, itself, an ear worm! The Book of Sarth is the first example of an entirely new art form for the early 21st century.  The initial offering of the Gralbum Collective, a self-described group of musicians, artists, and programmers working to establish new forms for creative expression, The Book of Sarth is available now in the App Store and has to be experienced, more than described, but an attempt at a verbal description follows:
Imagine discovering an ornate leather-bound book abandoned in an attic; when you pick it up, a voice says “Open the Book”. Â Cradling the iPad in your lap like an old tome, flipping through parchment pages with colorful watercolors, it really does feel as if you’ve discovered a magical story book, one where the drawings come alive and music fills the stereo field (headphone listening is strongly recommended for the experimental, Kyma-drenched score by Sarth Calhoun).
Like the tracks on the album, the animated paintings come in “chapters”, each having its own style and character: the storybook water colors of “Discovery”, the ink-on-glass Japanese photo/drawing colorized loops of “Transmission”, the stark black and white ink images of Occupy-like mass protests for “Awakening”, psychedelic pattern loops for “Access”, symbolic poker-hands and other cryptic numbers (4 X 7), beautiful iridescent ghostly animations on black-inked stark background images of the police state, and so on, concluding with an Epilogue of beautiful geometric patterns, sometimes occluded by human silhouettes.
Born into an angular world with no color, two children discover a sound-generating device that enraptures the world, introducing color, movement and shapes; the epilogue hints at ancient technologies that were known to resonate with sounds of a healing nature and reveal hidden order and patterns.  The rest of the narrative is a struggle between the black-and-white (or “the brown and grey”) police state who shut down the transmissions, and the rioting crowds who learn to make their own underground sound-generating devices.
The musical narrative can accompany the visual or not and is an uncompromisingly experimental mix of vocoding, heavily processed poetry, ear-worm inducing loops, exquisitely glitchy electronics, and Euclidean rhythms. Â It ends, not with an ecstatic out-of-body experience, but with a warning: “the black days are coming.”
Imagine yourself surrounded by nothing but a featureless whiteness, a world in which the only way to discover objects or people around you  is to splatter black paint in the hopes of revealing their outlines and shapes.
Giant Sparrow’s The Unfinished Swan is a new kind of game, and composer Joel Corelitz has taken a new approach to scoring the music for the new PlayStation title.  Seeking to blur the line between the real and the synthetic, Corelitz chose to imitate electronic sounds with acoustic instruments and to imitate acoustic instruments with electronics.  He used Kyma for the electric harpsichord sounds in the ‘switched-on’ type pieces, and he used the Kyma CrossFilter on the pads.
The Unfinished Swan, slated for an October 23, 2012 release, is already earning rave reviews for its unique approach and focus on creativity, exploration, and discovery.
Anne La Berge and Robert van Heumen are Shackle: a performance duo featuring Anne on flute processed through Kyma and Robert on Supercollider. In August 2012, they will be releasing The Shackle Stick, a USB stick containing music and video of their live performances (a portion of the cost for which will be covered by their successful Kickstarter project). Following the release of the Shackle Stick, the duo will be touring New Zealand, Australia and Brazil in September 2012.
Hamilton Sterling at Helikon Sound has just completed the sound for David Jacobson’s new film, Tomorrow You’re Gone, a story of psychological vengeance and real-world redemption. The film stars Stephen Dorff, Michelle Monaghan, and Willem Dafoe.
As sound designer, supervising sound editor, and re-recording mixer, Hamilton created a sonic world that functions almost as a musical score. Aside from guitar and drums (used by the composer), almost every scene in the film is inflected by sounds generated in Kyma (appropriately enough, since most of the film may or may not take place from a point of view inside the main character’s head).
Artists Mark Amerika and Chad Mossholder‘s Micro-Cinematic Essays on the Life and Work of Marcel Duchamp dba Conceptual Parts, Ink will be premiered soon as an installation at  The Centre for Creative Arts in La Trobe. Described as “a collaborative ‘conceptual art’ album featuring the writing and vocals of Mark Amerika and the sound design of electronic music composer Chad Mossholder,” about 90% of the sounds were crafted in Kyma. The work is divided into nineteen tracks, each focusing on the work, language, notes, and influence of Marcel Duchamp on contemporary forms of remix practice. An exploration of glitch, microtonality, and the spectral analysis of recorded voices over time, Mossholder and Amerika challenge us to rethink the interrelationship between critical writing and critical listening. This work was made possible thanks to a visiting artist residency for both artists at the Centre for Creative Arts at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.
During the final mix for Disney’s Treasure Buddies, director Robert Vince asked sound designers Pat Haskill and Jean-Edouard Miclot to morph the voice of a puppy named Mudbud (voiced by Ty Panitz) from a human voice to the howl of a real puppy.  After a frantic and ultimately unsuccessful search of their sound libraries for a domestic puppy howl, the sound designers finally located a recording of a wolf pup that sounded close to Mudbud’s speaking voice, and they cross-faded from the actor to the wolf howl.  Unfortunately, the result still sounded like two independent layers. That’s when Jean-Edouard had the idea to load the two samples into Kyma’s Time Alignment Utility (TAU) where he could experiment with morphing using a tablet until he got the smooth transition he wanted. Re-recording mixers Gord Hillier and Samuel Lehmer mixed the sound in and, according to Jean-Edouard, “everybody in the studio loved how natural the transition from human to animal was made.” You can hear the morph in the scene starting about 36″ into the following clip:
The Kyma International Sound Symposium is  four inspiring days and nights filled with sound design, ideas, discussions, and music, and it offers a wide range of opportunities to increase your Kyma mastery: from introductory master classes, to hands-on question-and-answer sessions; from thought-provoking presentations, to inspiring concerts and after-hours discussions with new-found friends and colleagues.
This year’s symposium KISS2012 will be on banks of the mighty Mississippi River, September 13-16, organized by St. Cloud State University School of the Arts and Symbolic Sound. The KISS2012 theme, reel time || real time, puts the spotlight on reel time (sound for picture), real time (live performance), and all timescales between, including sound design for games, live cinema, live improvisation ensembles, live performances from a score, sound design for live theatre, live signal generation for speech and hearing research, interactive data sonification, interactive sound art, and more!
Electronica: Zlatko Tanodi, the new album of Croatian composer Zlatko Tanodi‘s highly imaginative electo-acoustic music has just been released under the Cantus label. Tanodi is a true musical eclectic; as adept at writing orchestral and chamber music as jazz and pop arrangements and scoring films, he tours internationally, performing keyboards with his jazz ensemble Opus X and also serves as the Head of the Department of Composition and Theory at the Zagreb Academy of Music. All of these experiences are evident in the music on this disc which slips easily from the classical avant-garde to a cinematic dramaturgy worthy of a Hollywood space fantasy and even includes brief snatches of DnB. Throughout, Tanodi has woven a surprising and delightful thread of pure sound design and a fascination with the human voice (both speaking and singing). Even more impressive than Tanodi’s masterful command of an astonishing variety of musical styles, though, is the force of his unspoiled, almost child-like imagination. Sounds transform themselves in a seemingly inevitable way from operatic diva to demonic baby; string quartets, frogs, and abstract sine wave modulations receive equal amounts of loving attention to detail and craftsmanship.
For a little foretaste of the sonic delights you’ll enjoy in the full album, check out Tanodi’s introduction to his contributions to the Recombinant Art compilation, produced by Edmund Eagan. Electronica is a must-hear for anyone who enjoys the pure physical pleasure of being immersed in sound and music and is eager to be transported to another world, at least for the duration of this CD. You can order the full album from the Cantus web site (100 HRK is approximately USD17).
The culmination of two years of research and development, Kyma X.82, a new software update for the Kyma X/Pacarana sound synthesis engine, is specifically designed to take advantage of the expressive capabilities and extended control offered by today’s new crop of alternative controllers and cutting edge musical interface designs.
The recent explosion of interest in new musical interfaces and alternative controllers for sound design and music has created a need for sound synthesis and processing engines that can take full advantage of the increased bandwidths, higher resolution, lower latencies, continuous pitch and velocity values, and subtle expressive capabilities of these new controllers. Symbolic Sound has a long history of support for alternative and extended controllers in Kyma X, and Symbolic Sound’s newest release, Kyma X.82, introduces several additional features to support these innovative musical interfaces and alternative controllers.
Features in Kyma X.82 include over 20 new morphing sound synthesis algorithms, support for 14-bit MIDI controllers, and the publication of Kyma’s OSC protocol to support and inspire future developments of new instruments and controllers that can exploit Kyma’s responsive, high-resolution sound synthesis and processing algorithms in a seamless, plug-and-play manner.
Whether you are a sound designer performing expressive creature voices to picture, an electronic musician performing live on stage with alternative controllers, or a composer using physical controllers to create dense multi-layered textures of sound in the studio, you will be able to take advantage of Kyma X.82’s ease of parameter-mapping, low latency, high-resolution parameters, and legendary sound quality. Additional features of the new release include enhanced multichannel panning and effects, higher quality spectral analysis, and a 40% speedup in the software executing on the host computer.
Sound and Video Examples
3d Morph on iPad
Using one of the new Morph3d objects to morph among a re-synthesized Tuva singer, bongo, flute, angry cat, female voice, violin, cat meow, and shakuhachi using Kyma Control on an iPad.
Morphadasical
The foreground ‘melody’ is performed live on a Continuum Fingerboard, using KeyTimbre (near/far) and KeyVelocity (pressure) to morph between re-synthesized violin, trombone and flute. In the background, Kyma is generating the Sax/Flute morph pattern.
Medieval Miasma
The key-mapped spectrum of an organ is re-synthesized through a FormantBank with a slowly changing formant. The voice is a key-mapped spectral analysis/resynthesis using sine wave oscillators.
Peace Flute
A key-mapped flute spectrum is re-synthesized with a time-stretched attack and played on the Tonnetz in Kyma Control.
Spectres
A re-synthesized voice morphing to re-synthesized bowed glass performed on the Kyma Control keyboard. In the background, a key-mapped piano spectrum performed on a standard MIDI keyboard is re-synthesized through a FilterBank with vinyl clicks as the input to the filter.
Cloud Cadence
A key-mapped CloudBank on a set of piano samples, performed on a standard MIDI keyboard.
PNO Squeal
Key-mapped piano spectra re-synthesized by a FormantBank played on standard MIDI keyboard with ModWheel controlling the formant to create the ‘squeals’.
Sound designer, Samy Bardet, used Kyma to design a singing monkey, some supernaturally fast growing plants, and the voice of the ‘monster’ in Bibo Bergeron‘s new animated feature, Un Monstre á Paris.
We recently spoke with Samy to find out more about his work in sound design for film:
 What is your earliest sonic memory? (from childhood?)
The purring of my cat Mao.
When did you first realize that you wanted to be a sound designer? (Did you start from the side of music? From audio engineering? In other words, how did you come to be a sound designer?)
After a short stint as a live sound engineer, I fell in love with sound for motion picture and became a sound editor. I started out by doing a lot of cartoons for TV. That period was essential because I learned editing, creation, and sound design.
Her favorite sound for picture was the work that Hamilton Sterling and Richard King did on “Master and Commander”. One day she came in with an article talking about the sound design on Master and Commander; in the article she had circled the name “Kyma”, and she asked me “What is this?”. In order to answer her, I decided to buy one!!!
For Un Monstre á Paris, please tell us about the evolution of the singing monkey sound, how you imagined it, how you realized it, how you performed it, etc.
I started with the voice of -M- singing like an opera singer. When I saw the animation, I first tried using the classic monkey sound but it was unsuccessful. Those sounds were too short and not close enough in frequency.
I finally found a sample of capuchin monkey whose frequencies were closest to those of the human voice. I analyzed the human voice and the capuchin monkey in the Tau Player. Then I performed the result using my Motormix and, after several tries, once I was able to perform it in sync with the picture, the result was incredible!!!!
I understand that there is also a scene of a plant or plants growing at incredible speed. Can you tell us more about that scene and how you designed and controlled the sound for it?
This was created with a SampleCloud (one of my favorite prototypes) and played on the Wacom tablet. I took a short sample of leaves rustling, and with this magic tool it became a giant sunflower!
Who is the monster in Paris (and how did you design his voice)?
The voice of the monster in Paris is a mix between rock singer Matthieu Chedid ( “-M-” ), a raccoon, and my own voice … I used the Tau player again to morph these three sources in order to make him credible and sensitive.
From the point of view of the sound designer, what are the differences between working on an animated feature vs a live action feature with human actors? Or is it virtually the same? Do animated features give you more latitude for sound design? Or is it the same either way?
The editing is very different. In a live action feature, you’re constrained by the way the sound was spoken during shooting, and especially by the ambience. It must match exactly.
In an animated feature, you receive only the voices, so all the atmospheres can be created by your imagination…
In the end, though, I think that sound design is not so different between live action and animated features, because even in live action features you rarely use “real” sounds (of guns, cars, etc), it’s always exaggerated to make it more spectacular. And it’s the same in animated features.
Where does Kyma fit in your arsenal of sound design tools? Do you turn to Kyma for specific kinds of sounds or ways of working?
I’m working with a Pyramix which is the tool I find most flexible and effective for sound editing (and I think it is less well known in the US).
My Pacarana is connected via a Capybara (used as an audio interface) directly through digital inputs and outputs to the Pyramix. That way I can use Kyma as an external effect, sending a sound from the Pyramix. Or I can play Kyma Sounds and record directly in the Pyramix.
What would you identify as the strong points of Kyma or the sort of things that Kyma is best at?
Kyma is especially impressive when you want to treat a real sound and want it to stay organic and real-sounding… for example, with voices…
Were there any sounds on this film that you could not have done without Kyma?
The monster, the singing monkey and a great morph between a metallic sound and the name of “Raoul”.
Describe your ideal meal. Who would be there, what would be on the menu, where would it be, what would the conversation be like, etc
You would be there to talk about your vision of sound…
Einstein would be there to explain to us this strange dimension called space/time and also explain why today a neutrino can go faster than light…
Someone would be there to give the beginning of answer on the origin of life…
There are too many things to talk about with so many interesting people; it’s too complicated to reduce it to one meal…
If you were to give advice to someone who is just starting out as a sound designer, what would that be? What would you advise them to study, where should they live, what kind of work could they do to prepare themselves?
1. Listen to real life all around you; this is very inspiring….
2. Sound can be simple®
3. Break the rules.
What’s next for you? Do you have a project lined up (one that you are allowed to discuss yet?)Â What new sound design challenges are in store for you in 2011-2012?
I’ve just finished the sound design for an exposition in Paris. And I’m preparing a new motion picture called The Marsupilami by Alain Chabat; this is very big sound design challenge.
Thank you Samy!  We look forward to seeing (and especially hearing) Un Monstre à Paris!
