Category: Sound Recording

Course on Design Patterns for Sound and Music

Music 507 Design Patterns for Sound and Music. The art of sound design is vast, but there are certain patterns that seem to come up over and over again. Once you start to recognize those patterns, you can immediately apply them in new situations and start combining them to create your own sound design and live performance environments. We will look at design patterns that show up in audio synthesis and processing, parameter control logic, and live performance environments, all in the context of the Kyma sound design environment.

Registration open starting November 2017 (course starts in January 2018)
Music 507 Spring 2018
Mondays, 7:00 – 8:50 pm
Music Building 4th floor, Experimental Music Studios
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Experiencing the near-universe as sound

Robert Jarvis‘ sound art installation aroundNorth allows listeners to experience the near
universe as they have never heard it before. As the Earth spins on its axis, and day becomes night becomes day, our view of the near universe changes in terms of the changing positions of the stars in the sky. One star appears to stay stationary (the North Star); and the rest take about 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds to complete a full revolution.
‘aroundNorth’ offers listeners an opportunity to hear this phenomenon in real time. As each star crosses equally spaced virtual lines emanating from Celestial North Pole, a corresponding sound is heard that maps the star’s position in the sky, size, distance from Earth, brightness and temperature, creating a mesmerising sound map of the universe as viewed by our turning planet.

‘aroundNorth’ humanizes the astronomical, giving us an emotional key to help us relate the unfathomable heavens to our own experiences of time and space. With echoes of a Neolithic monument of ancient myth, the installation introduces us to a universe full of interest, encouraging us to think differently about the cosmos and our place within it.

Jarvis presented his installation on 15 October 2016 in a rather neolithic setting — the Beaghmore Stones Circle complex, preceded by an installation performance at Antrim Castle Gardens.

For more information, future showings, or to invite Robert Jarvis to create an aroundNorth experience in your city, see the aroundNorth web site.

Time is but the stream

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.

— Henry David Thoreau

Priscilla McLean’s Songs of Radiance triptych seems to draw inspiration both from the words of Henry David Thoreau and from the wild northern landscapes she calls home. Each song is a meditation on a Thoreau text, giving a glimpse inside McLean’s stream of consciousness, quiet at first, but then as new layers are deposited, one-by-one, the music eventually and inevitably seems to triumph and overtake all.

Songs of Radiance 3 (Time is but the stream) begins delicately, with hybrid flute-birds, Pierrot Lunaire-like Sprechtstimme, and a scurrying of instrumental samples evoking small mammals. Spoken text, pointillistic vocal effects, laughter, careening vocal glissandi and other vocalizations merge, blend, and morph into instrumental and electronic sounds. Here the voice is employed as an orchestra — its full range from speech, to bel canto, to isolated sibilants, to staccato laughter, to vocoder-like multitrack harmonies, coalescing into fresh and unexpected ensembles.

After hearing what Priscilla does with Kyma 7 and her voice, one can only hope that she has plans for live performance versions of these songs!

For more by Priscilla McLean (including the full Songs of Radiance cycle), visit her playlist.

Composer on a NASA mission

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.

Белые сны Dusha

Anna Martinova’s new album Белые сны Dusha is now available on iTunes.

Luxuriously ambient tone paintings with just a touch of frozen exhalation from the arctic, the music on Dusha is as uplifting as it is peace-inducing. A continuation of The Soul project and Martinova’s Tulpa psygressive work, Dusha is also heavily influenced by her discovery of Kyma.
 
 

I must say it is such a pleasure to work with Kyma, so incredibly inspiring.

Martinova works by generating WAV files in Kyma, arranging them in Logic, adding melodic lines created with Alchemy, and finally layering in recorded vocals using Logic. This is the first album on which we get to hear Anna’s vocals (all recorded at night, when her child is asleep and her cat isn’t jumping on the speakers).

Martinova is already hard at work on two more albums in the series. As a taste of what’s in store, here’s a song from the second album in the series Душа / The Soul. The music came to Martinova in a dream after she learned that a dear friend was experiencing a tough situation; she heard this music as a link connecting her to her friend:

Kyma Klub of Santa Cruz

When PhD candidate Madison Heying discovered there was a Kyma system at the University of California at Santa Cruz and that Kristin Erickson, Technical Coordinator of the Digital Arts & New Media center also had a personal Kyma system, they decided to organize the Kyma Klub — an informal group of students and staff members who meet weekly to read through Kyma X Revealed and teach themselves Kyma. The first public performance by club members was AQULAQUTAQU — a sci-fi operetta by Madison Heying & Kristin Erickson (voice & Kyma) with Matthew Galvin (voice & video), David Kant (voice), and Maya Galvin (narrator) — that they premiered at KISS2015 in Bozeman Montana (home of first contact).

In early February 2016, UCSC faculty composer Larry Polansky invited Kyma creators Carla Scaletti and Kurt Hebel to UC Santa Cruz where Carla presented a graduate colloquium on data sonification and a seminar on sound design in Kyma 7.

Here, Madison and Kristin are presenting some of the generative algorithms they implemented in Kyma for AQULAQUTAQU:

Madison Heying, Kristin Erickson Carla & Kurt UCSC 2016

After the seminar, the Kyma Klub invited Kurt and Carla to Kristin’s studio where David Kant interviewed Kurt,

Kurt Kristin Carla David UCSC 2016

and Kristin Erickson interviewed Carla, while Matthew Galvin filmed their responses in front of a green screen for an as-yet-undisclosed proposal the Kyma Klub members have in mind to make for KISS2016.

Kristin Erickson interviewing Carla Scaletti UCSC 2016

Note the special blacklight Kyma Klub T-shirts (with matching event posters) designed and printed by Kristin and Madison for the visit.

carla on madison & kristin greenscreen UCSC 2016

Spirals within spirals

Carlos Alberto Augusto’s new opera — “TMIE: on the threshold of the outside world” (TMIE is an acronym for Trans Membrane Inner Ear) — for soprano and electronic track, interleaves three stories of audition and spirals. A single soprano plays three women — a Selene goddess, a deaf astronomer named Henrietta Leavitt who “heard what the stars were telling her”, and Beverly Biderman, a Canadian who underwent cochlear implant surgery to regain the pleasure of music.

Augusto produced the electronic track entirely in Kyma using roulette curves applied to different sonic parameters.

The libretto is based, among other texts, on books by Beverly Biderman and George Johnson.

The work, a Miso Music Portugal production with support from Widex Portugal, premiers on February 25th in Lisbon at the O’culto da Ajuda venue with two more performances on the 26th and 27th, and will start touring Portugal later this year.

 

Kyma at ICMC2015

Kyma had a strong presence at the 2015 International Computer Music Conference in Denton Texas, September 25 — October 1, including live performances by

Jeffrey Stolet,
ICMC2015JeffStolet2

Wang Chi,

Jon Bellona,
JP Bellona ICMC2015.jpg

Jon Bellona angst2

and Sun Hua,
Sun Hua ICMC2015.jpg
a keynote lecture by Symbolic Sound president Carla Scaletti,
ICMC2015 keynote Title Slide

ICMC2015 keynote social brain crowd

ICMC2015 keynote IMS to Platypus

ICMC2015 keynote platypus meets capybara Wang photo

ICMC2015 keynote close2

ICMC2015 keynote SSC in 1989

ICMC2015 keynote smiling at laptop2

ICMC2015 keynote output from the brain

ICMC2015 keynote computer musicians predict the future

ICMC2015 keynote making imaginary real

a one-hour Kyma workshop also presented by Scaletti (new music pioneer Larry Austin is seen in the audience at the lower left)
Kyma workshop ICMC2015 photo by Chi Wang

and fixed media pieces by Fred Szymanski and Jinshuo Feng. (If we’ve left anyone out, please let us know!)

Thanks to the ICMC 2015 organizers, presenters, and composers!

Special thanks to the ICMC organizers, Wang Chi, Sun Hua, and Jon Bellona for the photos and Iacopo Sinigaglia for the video excerpt.

QUANTUM in the desert: art, science, technology & collaboration

In April 2015, QUANTUM, the dance piece Jobin created inspired by his residency at CERN, will be touring northern Mexico including Culiacan, Hermosillo, Tijuana, Ensenada and Mexicali. Technical director Marie Predour will be running the live sound for the piece using a Kyma 7 Timeline.

Choreographer Gilles Jobin took a moment to talk a little about the piece, to explain his ideas on algorithmic choreography and to reflect on collaboration, art, science, and technology.

 

What’s interesting about technology is not so much the technology as a tool, but technology as a new way of thinking — as a different way to organize your work or to think about your work. The same is true when choreographers work with scientists or with musicians. There is a kind of exchange of practices that is enriching for everybody.

14 April Culiacan РFestival Danza Jos̩ Limon

16 April Hermosillo – Un Desierto Para La Danza

19 April Tijuana – Cuerpos in Transito

21 April Ensenada – Espuma Cuantica

23 April Mexicali – Entre Fronteras

27 April to 2 May Torreon – Gilles Jobin will be on the jury for Premio Nacional Guillermo Arriaga

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.