Sound designer, Ben Burtt. Photo by Gregory Schwartz (www.editorsguild.com)
There’s a fascinating piece by Mel Lambert on the Editor’s Guild web site, giving details of every aspect of the sound—from dialog to Foley, to mixing, to creative sound design— for JJ Abrams new science fiction film, Super 8.
In it, master sound designer, Ben Burtt details how he used his own voice to control a bank of sounds in Kyma, performing it like a musical instrument to create the voice of the alien.  Burtt says that he wanted to create a character who, although alien, had an expressive soul, purpose, and rationality.  Once Industrial Light & Magic, which handled visual special effects, heard Burtt’s vocalizations, they were so inspired that they added a tongue to the creature’s mouth! One of the few times that they created picture to sound, instead of the other way around.
Full of insider tips and tricks ranging from how Burtt sustained the tension in a long train crash scene to how Matthew Wood compensated for young actors’ voices changing over the course of the shoot, the piece is essential reading for anyone who’s serious about sound design!
(Thanks to Matteo Milani for spotting this article and sharing it with us!)
Supervising Sound Editor, Matthew Wood (www.editorsguild.com)
Yasuski (aka Yasushi Yoshida) has just posted a series of videos of his handmade Mbiraski instrument processed live through Kyma and his Audio Hologram (a 3D performance space of his own design). Â Etheral, calming, and deceptively organic, it’s the perfect music for a summer day.
Here’s one where Yasuski goes Medieval on us with a closer view of the Mbiraski and Delora Software’s vKiP controlling Kyma from an iPad:
And another where the Kyma processing almost sounds like frogs on hot, humid summer night:
Amon Tobin has just launched ISAM — an album, audio-visual live performance tour and art exhibition — pairing Tobin’s original and evocative music with Tessa Farmer’s intriguingly organic sculptures. Both artists, Tobin in sound and Farmer in sculpture, explore the rearrangement of the “familiar” in disturbing, playful and highly original ways. Imagine opening the specimen drawer in a darkly lit Victorian-style natural history museum in a parallel universe while a steampunk science-fiction-meets-Sgt.-Pepper score plays in the background and you’ll start to get the picture.
In ISAM, Tobin uses Kyma to successfully blur the distinction between sound design and music: transforming sound effects into drippy, gurgly beats that sound like they were emitted from steam-powered machines; continuously gliding pitches seamlessly morph into harmonic anthems; and repeating rhythmic and harmonic patterns with endlessly changing orchestrations and backgrounds; glockenspiel fairy tales juxtaposed with aliens bursting unexpectedly out of bubbling tar pits. The music is evocative, cinematic, and highly original: chopped spectra with hints of vocal resynthesis; Klangfarben rhythms; electronic insects encountering R2D2, repeating distortion patterns; the soundtrack from a childhood nightmare set to a swinging 6/8 nursery rhyme beat; sitars followed by glass beads flung across a frozen pond at midnight; aliens dancing heavily & deliberately at BPM = 76; and those ubiquitous miniature skeletons dancing so wildly that tiny bones fly off at right angles, making tinkly sounds as they hit the floor.
The audio quality is superb, always crisp, clean and masterfully mastered.
Despite all the little skeletons, the overall atmosphere of ISAM is playful, rousing, and at times downright cheerful—and the BPMs hovering between 76-88 make it the perfect iPod soundtrack for strutting in the city or skipping your way through a crowded airport.
ISAM: Control over Nature will be shown at the Crypt Gallery in London (26 May – 3 June 2011) followed by a showing at L’espace Art Roch in Paris (13 – 23 June 2011). Live tour dates so far are:
01.06.2011 Astra, Berlin, Germany
09.06.2011 AB Club, Brussels, Belgium
10.06.2011 Bataclan, Paris, France
11.06-17.2011 The Roundhouse, London, UK
Scott Miller is one of thirty Minnesota composers featured on a new double-CD from Innova entitled Here and Now, a recording in honor of St Paul-based new music ensemble Zeitgeist’s 30th anniversary. Produced, mixed and edited by Scott Miller and Pat O’Keefe, Here and Now will be celebrated by a three-day CD-Release Party at Studio Z at 7:30 pm, January 6-8 2011.
Scott Miller is one of thirty Minnesota composers featured on a new double-CD from Innova entitled Here and Now, a recording in honor of St Paul-based new music ensemble Zeitgeist‘s 30th anniversary. Produced, mixed and edited by Scott Miller and Pat O’Keefe, Here and Now will be celebrated by a three-day CD-Release Party at Studio Z at  7:30 pm, January 6-8 2011.
The music from Cristian Vogel and Gilles Jobin’s collaborative work, Black Swan was released in December 2010 by Sub Rosa (SR303): http://subrosa.itcmedia.net/en/catalogue/electronics/cristian-vogel-black-swan.html
Long before Natalie Portman donned the sequined black bird’s eye makeup, composer Cristian Vogel and choreographer Gilles Jobin were collaborating on their own Black Swan, the music for which was released in December under the Sub Rosa label (SR303).
Boomcat reviewed the recording on the Global Noises forum:
Those who follow Vogel’s movements will already know he is deeply involved with the legendary Kyma digital synthesis/sequencing system, and ‘Black Swan’ feels like the perfect extension of those interests.
Sound designer Mike Johnson made extensive use of Kyma in his sound design work for Blizzard Entertainment’s latest World of WarCraft expansion, Cataclysm, to create hybrid vocalizations for several of the new creatures that now populate the world of Azeroth.
Johnson used Kyma to create hybrid vocalizations for several of the new creatures that now populate the world of Azeroth. Â Creatures with names such asRock Demon, Fire Dragon, Slime Creature, Rock Worm, Stone Golem and Wood Creature were created by taking various human and animal vocalizations and warping them with fire, rock, and other elemental forces to visceral, terrifyingly effect. According to Johnson, “I couldn’t have done it without my Kyma system.”
Kyma played such a strong role in the sound design for Yogesh Kubchandani’s directorial debut, The Acceptance, he gave it an ending credit. Can you solve the mysteries in this compelling, poetic film? http://www.3stonespictures.com
Following the initial screening of The Acceptance in New York City, director Yogesh Khubchandani, was barraged by questions when he took the stage. He politely declined to speak about the film, suggesting only that if people still had questions, they should watch the film again, adding “there are no symbols in the film; I just had one impression that could not be expressed in words, and so the film came out.” Can you solve its mysteries? (Order your own DVD copy of the film at http://www.3stonespictures.com)
Certain unforeseen events can almost literally befall us, unexpectedly and violently tearing into the web of our interconnections and relationships. In Yogesh Khubchandani’s new film, The Acceptance, one such event has disrupted the existence of Elli (compellingly played by Alicia Lobo) to its very core. Khubchandani’s poetic, spell-binding film uses images and sounds to create an urgent sense of mystery as he traces her inner journey from near despair to a calm acceptance. Khubchandani masterfully recreates a seamless interleaving of the inner imagination and outer events that constitute Elli’s flow of experience. Intense emotion is experienced as sudden silence and a sense of time slowing almost to stop as the character focuses full attention on the anger or fear or frustration and the rest of the world disappears for that stretched-out moment of time. Several threads weave themselves throughout the film: the restorative power of nature, thanking God for what we do NOT have, vegetarianism as identity, the relationships between mothers and daughters (the male characters rarely appear on screen).
Khubchandani also did the sound design for the film, using the sounds of birds, wind and water contrasted with the rattling drones of machines to underscore his themes. Like the images, the sound slips easily back and forth between realism and the logic of dreams. Kyma played such a large role in this transformation, it even gets a credit at the end of the film!
Symbolic Sound’s Kyma Control for the iPad bundles four of the most popular Kyma controller-types into one, wireless multi-touch package that includes: a VCS, a pen/tablet controller, standard and Tonnetz keyboards, and accelerometers plus compass heading. Kyma Control is available from the Apple App Store (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/kyma-control/id396557400?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4)
Symbolic Sound’s Kyma Control for the iPad bundles four of the most popular Kyma controller-types into one, wireless multi-touch package that includes: a VCS, a pen/tablet controller, standard and Tonnetz keyboards, and accelerometers plus compass heading.  Check out the video demo.  Kyma Control is available from the Apple App Store.
Internationally acclaimed film composer, AR Rahman used Kyma (Harm Visser’s physical modeling toolkit) controlled by the Haken Audio Continuum Fingerboard to perform the lead on the dignified and ethereal Acid Darbari, as part of Rahman’s sound track for Danny Boyles’ new film, 127 hours. The full soundtrack is available for download from iTunes, Rhapsody and Amazon (http://www.arrahman.com).
Internationally acclaimed film composer, AR Rahman used Kyma (Harm Visser’s physical modeling toolkit) controlled by the Haken Audio Continuum Fingerboard to perform the lead on the dignified and ethereal Acid Darbari.  Rahman’s full soundtrack, composed for Danny Boyles’ film, 127 hours, is available for download from iTunes, Rhapsody and Amazon Direct links available here: http://www.arrahman.com.
The Sounds of Star Wars (http://www.chroniclebooks.com/soundsofstarwars/), a new book by JW Rinzler and Ben Burtt, describes how Kyma was used to create some of the iconic sounds in the Star Wars prequels.
The Sounds of Star Wars, co-authored by JW Rinzler and Ben Burtt, is no ordinary text; this book comes with its own built-in sound-playback system and headphone jack, so when you read about a sound, you can also hear it at the press of a button.
Not only does the book cover the classic Star Wars sounds, it also describes how Ben Burtt and Matt Wood used Kyma both to update some of those sounds as well as create new sounds for the prequels. Â You can read (and hear), for example, how they used Kyma to generate Wat Tambor’s dialog or to do frequency following on Doppler shifts for podracer fly-bys (and the Kyma Chopper to create the sound of pieces flying off the podracers).
