Sound designer Gurwal COÃC-GALLAS was asked to create a language for the little creatures that appear in the newest version of The Beauty and the Beast directed by Christophe Gans. Gurwal used Kyma to create their charming bird-like language (here’s a brief example):
Carla Scaletti was the featured guest artist on the 23 November 2013 Future Music Oregon concert at Beall Concert Hall in Eugene Oregon where the audience performed her compositions: Autocatalysis for Kyma and Live Audience (2010) and …odd kind of sympathy for Kyma and Live Audience (2011). The concert also featured Kyma premieres by composers Colin Salisbury, Nayla Mehdi, and Churan Feng and live performances of Jeffrey Stolet’s Theatre of Spheres for Kyma and Colored Spheres and Lariat Rituals for Kyma and Gametrak.
Following the Saturday concert, Scaletti conducted an all-day Kyma sound design workshop on Sunday and presented lectures on data sonification and the score for QUANTUM, a deconstruction of how Kyma was used in …odd kind of sympathy, and an advanced Kyma sound design lecture on the following Monday and Tuesday.
Kyma users from Arizona, California, New Mexico, Washington, and Oregon joined with Jeffrey Stolet’s graduate and undergraduate students in the workshops, hands-on labs, meal-time discussions, and some of the intense dark roast beverage the Pacific northwest is famous for.
We asked sound designer Mathieu Fiorentini of Quantic Dream to talk about how he used Kyma in the sound design for the PS-3 interactive psychological action thriller — Beyond Two Souls — starring Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe:
Throughout the whole game, the player encounters creatures from the other side, called the Entities. We designed the Entities sounds as a team.  For the part of the job that was assigned to me, Kyma helped me a lot to find and propose  layers for the movements and the growls of the creatures. I recorded some collections from the Tau Player, then put the results into the 3DMorphSampleCloud to merge with some human voices. I also got some very exciting results from the 100 Whooshes patch from JED (sound designer, Jean-Edouard Miclot).
In the final chapter of the game, I used Kyma for creatures and ambient sound. Â For example:
In this sound, the player is inside a kind of supernatural tempest. So I needed very consistent sound for the ambience. I used the 3DMorphSampleCloud prototype to merge and modulate various sound effects (wind, sand movements, volcano, dogs growl, my voice).
This is the sound made by some weird monsters made from sand particles; they come up from out of the ground to attack Jodie (the main character). I used the CrossFilter prototype to cross human voices and moans with the sounds of wind and gas jets.
I’m new Kyma user (1 year), and I’m so excited about getting deeper and deeper into Kyma. There’s something unusual and magic when I switch on my Pacarana. I know I’m going to spend time dedicated to search and experiment, and I often forget that I’m working on a computer. It helps me to focus only on the most important thing: the sound.
— Mathieu Fiorentini
P.S . Here is the complete list of the Quantic Dreams’ main audio team for Beyond Two Souls:
Audio Technologies for Music and Media is an international interdisciplinary conference that focuses on various aspects of audio, audiovisual and music technologies for music and media as well as the relationship between sound, music and image in both ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ media.
Isikyakar will demonstrate how he utilizes Kyma in his work and talk about how Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi‘s nine elements of flow apply to his way of interacting with Kyma. Csikszentmihalyi describes the ‘flow state’ as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one…”
“Working from a script shaped more by sound than words, insight comes at us in primal waves. The heart-wrenching sobs, the gut-churning nausea, the keening and, perhaps most profound of all, the silence. It all carries specific meaning.”
This is how Betsy Sharkey, film critic LA Times, describes Hamilton Sterling‘s sound for Morning, a film by Leland Orser with his wife Jeanne Tripplehorn, Laura Linney, Elliot Gould, Kyle Chandler, and Jason Ritter.
Sterling, who is credited as sound designer/re-recording mixer/supervising sound editor on the film, used Kyma to process the transitions to the characters’ memory flashbacks of their child in this tough and unsentimental exploration of a couple’s grief over the loss of their child.
The film opened in LA, New York, and select cities this month and will be available through VOD and DVD for those of us who do not live in “select cities”.
To create the space, Aly routed eight Kyma outputs across 26 Meyer Sound speakers grouped as: Front of House (10 speakers), Surround House (10 speakers) and Back of Stage (4 speakers) and Inside Stage (2 speakers). The ten actors and live musicians (voice, violin, custom electric guitar and electronics) were all miked and their inputs were mixed in a Midas Heritage 2000 mixing desk, sent to Kyma, and spread in space using reverberation and delay algorithms.
According to Aly, “..with only a few parameters I could move the space, stretch it, shrink it, delay it…Kyma it!!! For a sound designer it’s a dream come true. In this process I thought of what I wanted, realized it very efficiently in Kyma, and the results were amazing!”
At this year’s Kyma International Sound Symposium —12-15 September 2013 in Brussels, Belgium — composers, sound designers, and performers will be focusing on interfaces for interactive sound design and live performance.
Actor Allison Goodman, shown here controlling Kyma with an Emotiv EPOC neural headset, is one of the performers scheduled to appear at KISS2013 in Brussels September 12-15 2013
KISS2013: INTER faces will also feature technical sessions on topics ranging from signal processing to interfaces, an ‘Open lab’ where Kyma experts will be available to answer questions, hands-on demos and workshops focusing on innovative user interfaces and controllers, and evenings filled with live musical performances showcasing some of the best work created in Kyma this year, including music controlled by brain interfaces, game controllers, iPads, Continuum fingerboards and drawing tablets; audio signals used as controllers; Foley artists as live performers; live cinema; motion-tracked dancers, and more!
Kyma developers Carla Scaletti and Kurt J. Hebel will be joined by over 30 audio and music professionals from ten countries in presenting the seminars, music, and hands-on demonstrations.
Get up close and personal with hardware and software interfacing tools including Open Interface and Skemmi (the universal Open Sound Control interface builder), Soft Kinetic Cameras, Interface-Z sensor kits, Tobii eye trackers, Reactable on a Microsoft Surface, Raspberry Pi, Dynamixel, Microsoft Kinect, and more!
InterFaceOff
Modeled on a reality-TV-style creative competition, InterFaceOff pits teams of composers and engineers against the clock, challenging them to create new performance interfaces in just four days!
A Spatial Dialog
KISS2013 attendees will have a unique opportunity to learn about live spatialization performance from Belgian composer Annette Vande Gorne who, in a public dialog with Electric Sound author and composer, Joel Chadabe, will discuss and demonstrate musical spatialization using a 70+ loudspeaker Acousmonium installed in the Espace Senghor.
Concerts featuring performances of live interactive Kyma pieces will be spatialized in real-time by experts from Musique et Recherches utilizing their 70+ speaker Acousmonium.
Who should attend
Anyone who is obsessed with sound – whether a novice looking to kickstart his or her career, an expert seeking fresh inspiration, or someone who’s simply curious about sound, interfaces, or Kyma – will find in KISS2013 a chance to immerse themselves in sound and ideas for four intense and inspiring days and nights.
Here’s how Chicago-based sound designer and re-recording mixer, Dustin Camilleri describes his experience at last year’s KISS:
“…The unique thing about Kyma, I find, is that it appeals to such a wide spectrum of people doing such an amazingly diverse set of things, but sharing a common language. The conversations I had were so incredibly inspiring; the performances I saw were just over the top, and the community at large was just some of the nicest most genuine people I’ve ever had the pleasure of spending some time with. For a conference it was truly amazing.”
Registration and travel
Registration is now open. An early registration discount is in effect until August 1, 2013. Student discounts are also available.
Kyma is an open, real-time-controllable environment for the creation, modification, and combination of new sounds in ways that are totally different from a sequencer or digital audio workstation. Â Matteo Milani will conduct you on an exploration of the innumerable possibilities offered by the system with which it’s possible to create your own patches or Sounds. Â A Sound can be a simple audio file playback or reverb, but it can also be a complex combination of audio generators and modifiers, synthesis, re-synthesis, sampling recombined in infinite variety, modulating their parameters and entering into a dialog with one another. Â By means of the Timeline it’s possible to compose the sound, assembling individual Sounds into larger structures, drawing functions to control the way parameters evolve over time.
Kyma is therefore a language for the generation and transformation of complex sounds with which it is possible to create your own plug-in, virtual synth, performance environment, interactive sound sculptures, each one with its own virtual control surface for the management of parameters in real time by means of the MIDI or OSC protocol.
Workshop instructor Matteo Milani is both a sound designer and an advocate for the sound design profession as a whole.  An active sound designer and recordist for film, advertising and mastering, he also writes for several popular audio magazines, and his blog Unidentified Sound Object has generated an international following.  Milani also composes music and experimental soundscapes for multimedia installations and live events as well as producing and distributing his own sound effects libraries. The workshop will be presented in Italian (Milani can also answer questions afterward in English).
The workshop is free, but spaces are limited.  Please register in advance to reserve your place by sending email to SAE with “Seminario Kyma” in the subject line.  SAE urges you to register as soon as possible as space is limited!
What if it were computers who invented humans (and not the other way around?) Â In director Alessio Fava’s new film Genesis Project: the real story of creation, it seems an almost plausible and decidedly amusing hypothesis. Â Sound designer Matteo Milani put his Kyma sound design workstation to good use generating the ambiences. Â Highly entertaining for all computer users (or is it the other way around?), Genesis Project begs the question, “But what if humans develop self-awareness?” Â Be sure to check out the Human User Manual on the official Genesis Project site.
Composer Phil Curtis will be performing in two up-coming Los Angeles-area events, bringing his own brand of live sonic palimpsests to the work of two LA-area artists. On November 6, he’ll be providing live Kyma electronics for a performance of Anne LeBaron’s Floodsongs (2012), a choral setting of three poems by Douglas Kearney performed by the Santa Clarita Master Chorale as part of the last ever SCREAM electronic music festival at REDCAT on Saturday November 10 at 8:30 PM.
The following weekend – Friday through Sunday with two shows on Saturday – Curtis is performing as part of a Furnace, a piece conceived by Carole Kim at Automata in Chinatown. Shows are at 7:00 pm November 16-18 (extra show at 9:30 pm on the 17th). Automata is at 504 Chung King Court. This will be a big multimedia interactive extravaganza with Butoh dance, Experimental Music, and Live Video Projection! Seats are VERY limited, so advance tickets are highly recommended!
Ilker Isikyakar, sound designer and composer at 
“Working from a script shaped more by sound than words, insight comes at us in primal waves. The heart-wrenching sobs, the gut-churning nausea, the keening and, perhaps most profound of all, the silence. It all carries specific meaning.”
KISS2013 attendees will have a unique opportunity to learn about live spatialization performance from Belgian composer Annette Vande Gorne who, in a public dialog with Electric Sound author and composer, Joel Chadabe, will discuss and demonstrate musical spatialization using a 70+ loudspeaker Acousmonium installed in the Espace Senghor.
Composer 
The following weekend – Friday through Sunday with two shows on Saturday – Curtis is performing as part of a Furnace, a piece conceived by Carole Kim at Automata in Chinatown. Shows are at 7:00 pm November 16-18 (extra show at 9:30 pm on the 17th). Automata is at 504 Chung King Court. This will be a big multimedia interactive extravaganza with Butoh dance, Experimental Music, and Live Video Projection! Seats are VERY limited, so advance tickets are highly recommended!