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.
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.
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.
Roland Kuit and filmmaker Karin Schomaker were at STEIM on 4 September to present Patterns as an articulated language. Recently, Kuit has been intertwining synthesizers and Kyma, recently it was the Buchla and this time it was Kyma/NMG2.
A Little Night Music is an evening of Visualized Music—films composed to music (rather than music composed for films) featuring videos by Roxanne Rea in collaboration with composers Bill Rea, Debra Kaye, and the owner of Kyma system serial number 1: Dick Robinson!
In Reimagined : Synthesized Soundscapes of California, sound artist Micah Frank re-imagines the parched landscape of drought-striken California through field recordings collected on site and then spectrally dissected, manipulated and resynthesized through additive, granular and filter bank resynthesis in Kyma 7.
Through a combination of low rainfall and high temperatures, California is experiencing its worst drought in 1200 years. From September through October 2014, Micah Frank embarked on a soundscape ecology project to create a sonic profile of California parks, their biophonies and geophonies. But to his surprise, each park he visited was like a ghost world. Although he was able to capture geophonic sounds like wind and rain, there were almost no biophonic sounds of birds or other animals.
His starkly reimagined soundscape was generated entirely from the field recordings processed through spectral analysis and resynthesis.
Opus Caementicium, a short, abstract cinematic ode to concrète by Karin Schomaker with a Kyma generated score by Roland Kuit will be screened in New York on March 13, 2015 at EZUFFPP#6 NY— a festival bridging experimental architecture, experimental film, and experimental music at Spectrum Space in NYC.
Described as “an experience of form, light, surface, sound and movement,” Opus Caementicium is “an attempt to transcend the mere material.” For the soundtrack, Kuit uses the Slipstick synthesis module to create pulses that are frequency modulated and fed into a Resonator Bank. These reflections of sound are then Time/Frequency shaped to create a beautiful concrete sound/music environment.
EZUFF is different kind of film festival that spans objective and subjective realms and bridges gaps among different scholarly traditions. They see horizons not boundaries. EZUFF is a ‘projectivist’ project playing with ideas of:
the projection of moving images – the film medium
the idea that the projections of moving image could be related to (or used as a pretext to address) actual & future ‘projections’ of the city/urban life
Using short experimental movies to make a link between contemporary urban forms of expression/representation and the political imagination for the city of today, EZUFFÂ is about oblique ways to dig into present day urban cultures and imagine alternatives for the cities of tomorrow
Tune in your shortwave radio and establish a comm link; Transmission Apparatus is Unidentified Sound Object’s new recombinant construction kit for creating a broad range of communication sounds, from real to “alien†broadcasting signals. The library contains more than 2 GB of data, delivered in 373 files of unique sound material, including radio samples, unintelligible voices and Kyma-synthesized noises.  Here’s an audio demo!Â
Unidentified Sound Object is an independent sound effects libraries publisher offering high resolution sound effects and virtual instruments for film, games and music creations, launched by Matteo Milani in 2011. All of the audio files have been loudness-normalized, based on the recommendations of the European Broadcast Union, and embedded with metadata for detailed and accurate searches in your software asset management.
A few months ago, sound designer Gurwal Coïc-Gallas got a call from sound superviser Guillaume Bouchateau asking him to join the team for Luc Besson’s latest project, Lucy. Gurwal was tasked with creating sound design libraries that the editors could draw upon when creating the special effects. In particular, Gurwal was asked to focus on:
Organic cellular movement (when Scarlet Johansson’s body is transforming)
Electromagnetic fields (because she can see electromagnetic fields) and
Voice effects (on her thoughts)
Gurwal used Kyma cross-synthesis on all the sounds and is enthusiastic about the results: “The movie is great, huge, surprising, probably one of Besson’s best, and the soundtrack is amazing!”
Composer/researcher/sound designer Roland Kuit is currently composer-in-residence at the EMS in Stockholm working on a project that combines their Buchla 400 with Kuit’s Kyma/Pacarana system.
He is also at work creating new pieces for Pacarana and Chicago based composer/conductor Renee Baker‘s Chicago Symfonietta to be premiered in New York this fall, and you can hear him lecture on modular sound design for TV and games the Napier University in Edinburgh in February 2015.  Check out his full calendar here.
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.
Opus Caementicium, a short, abstract cinematic ode to concrète by 
