A little night music

image001

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!

Sycamore Place Gallery

120 Sycamore Place
Decatur GA 30030

October 10, 2015
at 8:30 p.m.

Suggested Donation $15

Reimagining a parched soundscape

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.

EZUFFPP#6 Film Festival in New York

opus caementiciumOpus 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, EZUFF is about oblique ways to dig into present day urban cultures and imagine alternatives for the cities of tomorrow

Sci-fi communication sounds SFX Library

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! 

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.

Kyma transforms Lucy

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!”

Roland Kuit in Stockholm, New York, Edinburgh

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.

Kyma Spectum Editor in Tesseract Portal Device

Sound designer François Blaignan had an opportunity to apply Kyma in an unusual way in his work on the interactive multimedia exhibition Marvel’s Avengers STATION (Science Training and Tactical Intelligence Operative Network) now on display in Time Square in NYC and featured in this month’s Mix magazine. The 10,000-square-foot installation is a space where Avengers fans can immerse themselves in characters and artifacts associated with the Avengers.

 For the Tesseract Portal Device, the installation designers were having a hard time matching the look of the spectrograms of X-rays, infrared, and gamma rays provided to them by NASA.  So Blaignan created an animation using stills from Kyma’s spectrum editor and synched it to the Tessaract sound from the movie for a perfect match.

Kyma wasn’t a totally silent partner on the project; it also played a role in creating the sounds of the particle accelerator in Banner’s lab.

From Organs to Organs — KISS2014: Organic Sound

Workshops, Talks, and Live Performances on “Organic Sound”

From organs (biological) to organs (musical), this year’s Kyma International Sound Symposium (KISS2014), to be held in Lübeck Germany on 25-28 September 2014, will explore multiple meanings of the phrase “organic sound” through technical talks, live performances, and hands-on workshops. Sound designers, composers, and live performers are invited to participate in a wide range of thought-provoking activities including:

  • An examination of how to emulate the organic sound of the analog recording studio using Kyma, presented by composer/sound engineer Greg Hunter of Dub Sahara
  • A special evening of “pipe organs like you’ve never heard them before” in the experimental, virtuosic hands of master organist/composer Franz Danksagmüller and his students
  • Intensive afternoons in The Collaboratory creating and rehearsing several world premieres including a live sound track for a new film by experimental filmmaker Theo Lipfert performed by faculty and students of the Musikhochschule Lübeck processed through Kyma
  • A hands-on “plantification” workshop where you’ll learn from Rudi Giot and his graduate engineering students how to control Kyma sounds through the growth of living plants

Events will kick off on Thursday with the unveiling of a major new release of the Kyma software and will culminate on Sunday with an evening of dancing to Kyma beats at club Parkhaus. The full program is online at: http://kiss2014.symbolicsound.com/detailed-program

Stummfilmprojekt

About the Symposium

KMHHosted this year by Franz Danksagmüller and the Musikhochschule Lübeck, each morning of KISS2014: “Organic Sound” features technical/philosophical sessions on topics ranging from voice processing, to sonification of organic chemicals and the Internet, to organic growth and decay, to how to build your own performance controller and use it to control Kyma via OSC, to presentations by individual composer/performers detailing how they utilize Kyma in their live performances and installations.

Afternoons are dedicated to interaction and hands-on activities including open rehearsals of collaborations-in-progress in The Collaboratory, a workshop on Conduction ensemble improvisation techniques presented by London Improvisers Orchestra trombonist and Kymaist Robert Jarvis, and the Kyma Open Lab where Kyma experts (Jeffrey Stolet, Cristian Vogel, Bruno Liberda, Scott Miller, Kurt Hebel, Carla Scaletti and others) will be on hand to answer your questions and consult with you on your current projects.

Franz foreground recording two percussionist

This year’s KISS features more live performances than ever before, with concerts every evening showcasing some of the best work created in Kyma this year, presented in the acoustically perfect MHL Große Saal and the Jakobikirche Lübeck with its three historically important pipe organs, famously decorated with faces on every pipe.

Check out the exciting lineup of presenters, composers, performers and Kyma experts here.

Who should attend

organ pipesAnyone who lives for sound — whether you are a novice looking to kickstart your career, an expert seeking a fresh jolt of inspiration, or simply someone who is curious about sound and Kyma — you will find in KISS2014 a chance to meet kindred spirits and immerse yourself in sound and ideas for four intense and inspiring days and nights of non-stop discussions, interactions, music and sound design.

Here’s how Chicago-based sound designer and re-recording mixer, Dustin Camilleri (http://www.pulsetrain.net) describes his experience at a previous 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.”

Registration and travel

Registration is now open: http://kiss2014.symbolicsound.com/kiss2014-registration. Discounts are available for students and for anyone registering before 1 August 2014.

For travel and lodging information, please visit: http://kiss2014.symbolicsound.com/travel-and-lodging

More information

Stay apprised of the latest KISS2014 news:

KISS2014 Site: http://kiss2014.symbolicsound.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Kyma-International-Sound-Symposium/241910735840451
Twitter: http://twitter.com/KymaSymposium

Contact the organizers: mailto:info.kiss2014@gmail.com