The Kyma International Sound Symposium is  four inspiring days and nights filled with sound design, ideas, discussions, and music, and it offers a wide range of opportunities to increase your Kyma mastery: from introductory master classes, to hands-on question-and-answer sessions; from thought-provoking presentations, to inspiring concerts and after-hours discussions with new-found friends and colleagues.
This year’s symposium KISS2012 will be on banks of the mighty Mississippi River, September 13-16, organized by St. Cloud State University School of the Arts and Symbolic Sound. The KISS2012 theme, reel time || real time, puts the spotlight on reel time (sound for picture), real time (live performance), and all timescales between, including sound design for games, live cinema, live improvisation ensembles, live performances from a score, sound design for live theatre, live signal generation for speech and hearing research, interactive data sonification, interactive sound art, and more!
Post-human investigator Steven T. Brown‘s new video, Flowering of Resistance, pays tribute to thinkers throughout history who have had the courage to shake things up.
In it, you can hear how he uses Kyma to generate a slowly ‘flowering’ timbre, beautifully shaken up and interrupted with stutter effects to match the shaken images. Selected for inclusion in the (sub)Urban Projections Festival held in Eugene, Oregon on November 9-23, 2011, Brown dedicates this video to his fellow participants in the Occupy movement all over the world. He concludes with the reminder that:
The power to resist the status quo in a non-violent fashion is as important to the healthy functioning of a democracy as is the ability to forge consensus.
The culmination of two years of research and development, Kyma X.82, a new software update for the Kyma X/Pacarana sound synthesis engine, is specifically designed to take advantage of the expressive capabilities and extended control offered by today’s new crop of alternative controllers and cutting edge musical interface designs.
The recent explosion of interest in new musical interfaces and alternative controllers for sound design and music has created a need for sound synthesis and processing engines that can take full advantage of the increased bandwidths, higher resolution, lower latencies, continuous pitch and velocity values, and subtle expressive capabilities of these new controllers. Symbolic Sound has a long history of support for alternative and extended controllers in Kyma X, and Symbolic Sound’s newest release, Kyma X.82, introduces several additional features to support these innovative musical interfaces and alternative controllers.
Features in Kyma X.82 include over 20 new morphing sound synthesis algorithms, support for 14-bit MIDI controllers, and the publication of Kyma’s OSC protocol to support and inspire future developments of new instruments and controllers that can exploit Kyma’s responsive, high-resolution sound synthesis and processing algorithms in a seamless, plug-and-play manner.
Whether you are a sound designer performing expressive creature voices to picture, an electronic musician performing live on stage with alternative controllers, or a composer using physical controllers to create dense multi-layered textures of sound in the studio, you will be able to take advantage of Kyma X.82’s ease of parameter-mapping, low latency, high-resolution parameters, and legendary sound quality. Additional features of the new release include enhanced multichannel panning and effects, higher quality spectral analysis, and a 40% speedup in the software executing on the host computer.
Sound and Video Examples
3d Morph on iPad
Using one of the new Morph3d objects to morph among a re-synthesized Tuva singer, bongo, flute, angry cat, female voice, violin, cat meow, and shakuhachi using Kyma Control on an iPad.
Morphadasical
The foreground ‘melody’ is performed live on a Continuum Fingerboard, using KeyTimbre (near/far) and KeyVelocity (pressure) to morph between re-synthesized violin, trombone and flute. In the background, Kyma is generating the Sax/Flute morph pattern.
Medieval Miasma
The key-mapped spectrum of an organ is re-synthesized through a FormantBank with a slowly changing formant. The voice is a key-mapped spectral analysis/resynthesis using sine wave oscillators.
Peace Flute
A key-mapped flute spectrum is re-synthesized with a time-stretched attack and played on the Tonnetz in Kyma Control.
Spectres
A re-synthesized voice morphing to re-synthesized bowed glass performed on the Kyma Control keyboard. In the background, a key-mapped piano spectrum performed on a standard MIDI keyboard is re-synthesized through a FilterBank with vinyl clicks as the input to the filter.
Cloud Cadence
A key-mapped CloudBank on a set of piano samples, performed on a standard MIDI keyboard.
PNO Squeal
Key-mapped piano spectra re-synthesized by a FormantBank played on standard MIDI keyboard with ModWheel controlling the formant to create the ‘squeals’.
Sound designer, Samy Bardet, used Kyma to design a singing monkey, some supernaturally fast growing plants, and the voice of the ‘monster’ in Bibo Bergeron‘s new animated feature, Un Monstre á Paris.
We recently spoke with Samy to find out more about his work in sound design for film:
 What is your earliest sonic memory? (from childhood?)
The purring of my cat Mao.
When did you first realize that you wanted to be a sound designer? (Did you start from the side of music? From audio engineering? In other words, how did you come to be a sound designer?)
After a short stint as a live sound engineer, I fell in love with sound for motion picture and became a sound editor. I started out by doing a lot of cartoons for TV. That period was essential because I learned editing, creation, and sound design.
Her favorite sound for picture was the work that Hamilton Sterling and Richard King did on “Master and Commander”. One day she came in with an article talking about the sound design on Master and Commander; in the article she had circled the name “Kyma”, and she asked me “What is this?”. In order to answer her, I decided to buy one!!!
For Un Monstre á Paris, please tell us about the evolution of the singing monkey sound, how you imagined it, how you realized it, how you performed it, etc.
I started with the voice of -M- singing like an opera singer. When I saw the animation, I first tried using the classic monkey sound but it was unsuccessful. Those sounds were too short and not close enough in frequency.
I finally found a sample of capuchin monkey whose frequencies were closest to those of the human voice. I analyzed the human voice and the capuchin monkey in the Tau Player. Then I performed the result using my Motormix and, after several tries, once I was able to perform it in sync with the picture, the result was incredible!!!!
I understand that there is also a scene of a plant or plants growing at incredible speed. Can you tell us more about that scene and how you designed and controlled the sound for it?
This was created with a SampleCloud (one of my favorite prototypes) and played on the Wacom tablet. I took a short sample of leaves rustling, and with this magic tool it became a giant sunflower!
Who is the monster in Paris (and how did you design his voice)?
The voice of the monster in Paris is a mix between rock singer Matthieu Chedid ( “-M-” ), a raccoon, and my own voice … I used the Tau player again to morph these three sources in order to make him credible and sensitive.
From the point of view of the sound designer, what are the differences between working on an animated feature vs a live action feature with human actors? Or is it virtually the same? Do animated features give you more latitude for sound design? Or is it the same either way?
The editing is very different. In a live action feature, you’re constrained by the way the sound was spoken during shooting, and especially by the ambience. It must match exactly.
In an animated feature, you receive only the voices, so all the atmospheres can be created by your imagination…
In the end, though, I think that sound design is not so different between live action and animated features, because even in live action features you rarely use “real” sounds (of guns, cars, etc), it’s always exaggerated to make it more spectacular. And it’s the same in animated features.
Where does Kyma fit in your arsenal of sound design tools? Do you turn to Kyma for specific kinds of sounds or ways of working?
I’m working with a Pyramix which is the tool I find most flexible and effective for sound editing (and I think it is less well known in the US).
My Pacarana is connected via a Capybara (used as an audio interface) directly through digital inputs and outputs to the Pyramix. That way I can use Kyma as an external effect, sending a sound from the Pyramix. Or I can play Kyma Sounds and record directly in the Pyramix.
What would you identify as the strong points of Kyma or the sort of things that Kyma is best at?
Kyma is especially impressive when you want to treat a real sound and want it to stay organic and real-sounding… for example, with voices…
Were there any sounds on this film that you could not have done without Kyma?
The monster, the singing monkey and a great morph between a metallic sound and the name of “Raoul”.
Describe your ideal meal. Who would be there, what would be on the menu, where would it be, what would the conversation be like, etc
You would be there to talk about your vision of sound…
Einstein would be there to explain to us this strange dimension called space/time and also explain why today a neutrino can go faster than light…
Someone would be there to give the beginning of answer on the origin of life…
There are too many things to talk about with so many interesting people; it’s too complicated to reduce it to one meal…
If you were to give advice to someone who is just starting out as a sound designer, what would that be? What would you advise them to study, where should they live, what kind of work could they do to prepare themselves?
1. Listen to real life all around you; this is very inspiring….
2. Sound can be simple®
3. Break the rules.
What’s next for you? Do you have a project lined up (one that you are allowed to discuss yet?)Â What new sound design challenges are in store for you in 2011-2012?
I’ve just finished the sound design for an exposition in Paris. And I’m preparing a new motion picture called The Marsupilami by Alain Chabat; this is very big sound design challenge.
Thank you Samy!  We look forward to seeing (and especially hearing) Un Monstre à Paris!
London UK-based Zelig Sound, creators of music composition and sound design for TV, film, advertising and branding, recently created the sound and music for “The 360 Project”, two dramatic short films by Toronto-based director and photographer Ryan Enn Hughes that capture peak dance moves using 48 simultaneously firing cameras surrounding the performer (designed by The Big Freeze).  The result is a cross between photography, video, and ‘digital sculpture’, where time is frozen but is then unrolled in new three-dimensional sequences.
Sound designer Matthew Wilcock and his team used Kyma, performed on a Wacom tablet, for the whooshes, passes and synth sounds in both 360 pieces, BALLET 360 & KRUMP 360. They used Kyma to create a selection of sounds around the timbre they wanted, and later brought them into a DAW to edit them and layer in the music.
The team used the same process on a Zelig Sound branding project for Black Ocean. Wilcock estimates that 70% of the sound for Black Ocean was created by Kyma controlled by movements and gestures on the Wacom tablet.  The team set up the film to run in a loop while recording multiple performances of custom-designed Kyma Sounds on a Wacom tablet.  They then took the results of that session, and edited, selected, and layered them in their DAW.
