Dreamscapes, Barton McLean‘s ambitious new suite of five pieces with video accompaniment, explores the uncanny parallels between music and dream logic.
Symphonic in texture, complexity, and visceral impact, with an impressively broad sonic palette, ranging from quasi-acoustic, to raw electronic, to sounds that are indescribably ambiguous and fresh — electronic yet entirely physically plausible, this all-Kyma soundtrack is electronics with the subtlety and dynamics of acoustic instruments. It’s like listening in on the soundtrack of the universal unconscious.
Composer Roland Kuit was recently interviewed on the prime time news program SBS 6 Hart van Nederland to discuss his Kyma sound explorations that will be launched into space on September 8, 2016 on NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission to the near-earth asteroid Bennu.
While his music is being launched into space on September 8 2016, Kuit will be at the Kyma International Sound Symposium in Leicester, UK presenting his music and ideas along with filmmaker Karin Schomaker so you’ll have an opportunity to meet and talk with him at KISS2016.
Composer/sound designer Silvia Matheus is one of the presenters on the scientific program of the 12th International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research (CMMR2016) in São Paulo, Brazil on 05-08 July 2016. Matheus’ talk, State of Art in Sound Design, Production and Synthesis will include an opportunity for conference attendees to learn more about how Silvia uses Kyma in her sound design and composition work and to interact directly with her Kyma 7/Pacarana system.
The latest incarnation of Doom features “badass demons, big effing guns, and moving really fast” and thanks to sound designer/composer/writer Chad Mossholder, Kyma-enhanced sound design!
Extreme sound design, radical electronic music, and the impending hardware revolution — Darwin Grosse recently sat down with Symbolic Sound’s Carla Scaletti, and the resulting conversation took some unexpected turns. Listen to the full podcast on Darwin Grosse’s Art + Music + Technology podcast.
NeverEngine Labs (Cristian Vogel and Gustav Scholda) have announced a new set of classes and tools for creating and manipulating multicycle wavetables and audiofiles with embedded markers in Kyma 7. The new ROM tools can be used for creating multisample players and to prepare audio files for morphing oscillators, grain envelopes and wavetable libraries.
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.
Tour de Force, or how to de-construct a bicycle into sine- and cosine waves? Real-time spectral analysis, FFT, IFFT, spectral blurring, phase and frequency shifts of bicycle sounds are constructing a three dimensional sonic world whereby different algorithms produce a trajectory as a journey in stages.
On CD2:
99 Re-Cycle Sound Objects
Now it’s your turn! With the sounds on CD2, you can compose your own bicycle pieces using Kyma 7! Re-create Bicycle Music or create new Sound Art and upload your creations to:Â http://soundcloud.com/bicycle-soundart
Wiener Klangwerkstatt’s Tonsalon, the Viennese sound workshop founded in 2007, is now open to the public! You are invited to attend three Tonsalon events at Elektro Gönner in Vienna on the 2nd Tuesday of each month:
8 March 2016
12 April 2016
10 May 2016
In June, they yield to the soccer season and will resume again in the fall.
The program for the first Tonsalon on 8 March 2016 will be:
20:00: “No random random notes”, a lecture by Bruno Liberda
Have you ever wanted to do audio morphing like this?
UK Kyma Users’ group organizer Simon Smith announces that the second meeting of the group will take place at the University of West London, Ealing on the Saturday 20th of February from 10:30 am to 4:30pm and will feature a morphing masterclass by Pete Johnston.
Simon Smith
Charlie Norton, Kyma user and senior lecturer at University of West London, has generously agreed to host the event at the University music studios. The day will consist of a Masterclass/Workshop in the morning then after lunch, mingling, brainstorming and sharing of Kyma tips and hints. Also this will be an ideal opportunity to talk to the local organisers of this year’s Kyma International Sound Symposium (KISS2016)Â in Leicester UK: Craig Vear and Simon Smith.
If you would like to morph your own sounds at the workshop, please bring your Kyma system with headphones and some sound files you wish to morph.
Composer/sound designer Silvia Matheus is one of the presenters on the scientific program of the 
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.
