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.

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.

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.

New vocal samples from Andrea Young

Composer/performer Andrea Young has contributed several vocalises (melodies without words) to the Kyma library — perfect for experimenting with feature extraction or as spectrally-rich source material for manipulation and analysis/resynthesis.

In her artistic work, composer/performer Andrea Young explores the full range of potential interactions between voice and computer: acoustic, amplified, deconstructed/reconstructed, and extracting features from the voice to use as control signals for synthesis and processing algorithms.

Composer/Performer Dr. Andrea Young uses Kyma in her live performances

Although amplification and live processing are widely used in both experimental and commercial music, the last option — feature-extraction and remapping to (potentially unrelated) sound parameter controls — is much less explored.

Andrea has contributed several vocalises (melodies without words) to the Kyma library — perfect for experimenting with feature extraction or as spectrally-rich source material for manipulation and analysis/resynthesis. Check your Kyma 3rd party Samples folder, in the sub-folder Andrea Young.

Dr. Young studied vocal performance and composition at The University of Victoria, electronic music at The Institute of Sonology in The Hague, and holds a Performer-Composer doctorate from The California Institute of the Arts.

Kyma (7.43) Delivers Performance Enhancements and Expanded Functionality

The latest Kyma release (version 7.43) focuses on performance optimization and expanded functionality.

29 June 2024, Champaign, IL . The latest Kyma release (version 7.43) focuses on performance optimization and expanded functionality.

Performance Boost: Optimizations to the Smalltalk Interpreter and garbage collector have resulted in noticeable performance improvements for Kyma running on both macOS and Windows, especially under low-memory conditions.

Here’s a short video of the in-house tool we developed for monitoring and fine-tuning the dynamics of the garbage collector (Note: when monitoring memory usage, Kyma runs at half speed — this is just for in-house tweaking, not a run-time tool):

Expanded Functionality: Among other enhancements and additions, Kyma now allows you to bind Strings and Collections to ?greenVariables in a MapEventValues. This provides greater flexibility and modularity for “lifted” Sounds as well as signal-flow-wide references to features like file durations, names, collection sizes, and more.

Setting ?firstFileName to a String in all Sounds to the left of the MapEventValues
Binding a Collection of Strings to ?displayNames

The update is free: you can download it from the Help menu in Kyma. As always, a full list of changes and additions is included with the update.

Introducing the Pacamara Ristretto APU

6 September 2022: Symbolic Sound announces the Pacamara Ristretto Audio Processing Unit, representing a giant leap forward in performance, energy efficiency, and connectivity over previous generation APUs.

PRESS RELEASE
September 6, 2022

Symbolic Sound Unveils “Pacamara Ristretto” Audio Processing Unit (APU)

2.5 times performance boost, 20% lower price, expanded connectivity, and inter-application audio


CHAMPAIGN, ILLINOIS — Symbolic Sound announces a new Audio Processing Unit (APU) representing a giant leap forward in performance, energy efficiency, and connectivity over previous generation APUs. At less than half the size, the new Pacamara “Ristretto” delivers, on average, a 2.5 times jump in performance, a 20% reduction in cost, cooler operating temperature, expanded connectivity options, and seamless inter-application routing of audio and MIDI to/from applications running on a host computer.

Performance

Pacamara Ristretto’s compute-cycles and memory are solely dedicated to sound computation, delivering unprecedented levels of performance capabilities to sound designers for film and games, live electronic music performers, sound artists, educators, researchers, and audio professionals who require the highest-quality real-time audio, responsive live interaction, and unbounded creative flexibility from their tools.

“The Pacamara Ristretto represents a radical transformation, not just because it’s Symbolic Sound’s most powerful external APU yet, but because of the ease with which it communicates with the rest of the world,” said Symbolic Sound’s president Carla Scaletti. “Audio, MIDI, and OSC streams can be freely routed between Kyma and other audio applications on your computer and audio devices in your studio, including across LANs and out onto the Internet, creating a combinatorial explosion of sound creation possibilities.”

According to game/film sound design consultant and Pacamara field tester, Alan M. Jackson, “It’s the latest, most powerful revision of the most important audio DSP environment of the last 30 years.”

Powered by Kyma

Audio professionals can leverage the full Kyma 7 accelerated sound design environment for rapid prototyping, testing, creative exploration, and refinement of production-quality sound synthesis and processing algorithms to run in real time on the Pacamara Ristretto.

Kyma, described as a “recombinant sound design environment,” gives sound designers access to extensive libraries of unique audio synthesis and processing modules, along with tools for creating limitless combinations of those algorithms. Galleries of automatically-generated signal flow graphs help speed development, spark the imagination and boost the creative flow — providing creators with the advanced models needed to solve sound design challenges for games, film, live music, data sonification, voice processing, multi-sensor controllers, and more.

Deep integration between hardware and software has always been central to the Symbolic Sound approach. Hardware design is continually informed by software development and vice versa. As a result, the Kyma 7 sound development environment is optimally tuned to take full advantage of the huge increases in processing and memory bandwidth made available by the new Pacamara APU.

Sound designer and musician Cristian Vogel describes the Kyma software environment as “the best for innovating, prototyping and designing innovative digital sound processes… frictionless for ideation and research. Then, reliable and consistent at the outcome stage.”

Say Hello to My Little Friend

The Pacamara Ristretto is as comprehensive in its connectivity as it is diminutive in size. The back panel of the rugged, roadworthy enclosure includes:

• USB-C port for audio and MIDI transfer to/from host computer
• Two USB 2.0 ports for connecting audio interfaces and MIDI controllers
• 3.5 mm jack sockets for mic input and stereo headphone output
• RJ-45 network port to connect via a gigabit Ethernet cable to a host computer
• Wi-Fi antenna jack
• USB-C power input port

An APU does for Real-time Audio what a GPU does for Real-time Graphics

Audio professionals require high quality, low latency, reliable real-time audio synthesis and processing. That’s what an APU can deliver.

“The question is not whether a CPU is capable of real-time graphics generation and processing. Everyone understands the advantages of offloading real-time graphics computation onto one or more GPU(s) running in parallel with your main CPU. Not only does it free up memory and computing resources on your CPU, a GPU guarantees the highest-quality, glitch-free interactive real-time graphic performance. The same is true for audio!”

“With the Pacamara you have high quality, configurable algorithms running on dedicated, uncontended hardware,” explains Jackson, “The result is that it sounds great and it’s reliable.”

Soft Hardware

Unlike traditional audio hardware, which has a fixed functionality that never changes, the Pacamara Ristretto can adapt to the evolving needs of users. Regular, significant software updates ensure that Symbolic Sound APUs continue to gain features and functionality so that they actually improve with time.

Jackson adds, “there’s a subtle and important difference between hardware that is upgradeable… and hardware that DOES get upgraded continuously and significantly. Kyma is [Symbolic Sound’s] only product and [they’ve] been working on it, passionately, for decades. [They] have a proven history of constant and significant upgrades.”

What’s in a Name?

The name, Pacamara, comes from a hybrid coffee plant bred to produce larger beans on smaller trees planted closer together — evoking both the ‘recombinant sound’ design philosophy of Kyma and the smaller size, higher-yield of the Pacamara APUs. According to Scaletti, “Coffee aficionados know that a ristretto shot delivers twice the caffeine per milliliter as a standard shot of espresso. The Pacamara Ristretto is actually 2.5 times more powerful and less than half (44%) the volume of previous generations, meaning that the computational performance by volume has increased 5.7-fold.”

Summary

The Pacamara Ristretto is an APU, designed from the ground up for real-time sound synthesis and processing; it works in parallel with your main computer to deliver high-quality real-time audio signal computation, freeing up resources on the CPU for managing your overall studio workflow.

Audio professionals can leverage the full Kyma 7 accelerated sound design environment for rapid prototyping, testing, creative exploration, and refinement of production-quality sound synthesis and processing algorithms to run in real time on the Pacamara Ristretto.

The Pacamara Ristretto APU is the most recent development in a consistent flow of innovation from Symbolic Sound — from Capybara, to Capybara 33, Capybara 66, Capybara 320, Paca(rana) — the sixth generation Pacamara Ristretto APU is groundbreaking in terms of raw compute power, delivering a 2.5-fold leap forward in performance, connectivity, and dependability backed by extensive field testing in real world performance environments.

Pricing and Availability

The Pacamara Ristretto is available today at https://kyma.symbolicsound.com/order-now
Initial supplies are limited due to ongoing (and inexplicable) global electronic component shortages.

The price for a 4-processor Pacamara Ristretto is $3,818 (US)
An entry level, 2-processor system is available for $3,302 (US)

The Kyma 7 software for macOS or Windows is included with the APU.

Learn more

About Symbolic Sound

From its origins in 1990 when the first generation of APUs were assembled at a kitchen table in a student apartment, Symbolic Sound’s current software and hardware offerings represent over 30 years of continuous development, creation, refinement, and close interaction with customers, inspired by a passion for sound and an obsession with learning new things. Our business model is to share the results of our research and creative explorations in order to make it possible for us to continue this work and share future results with others so they, in turn, can build upon these results in their own creative and scientific work.