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

 Dance, Data-driven sound, Festival, Science, Video  Comments Off on QUANTUM in the desert: art, science, technology & collaboration
Mar 302015
 

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

Mar 172015
 

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.

aroundNorth around Northern Ireland

 Concert, Data-driven sound, Event, Installation  Comments Off on aroundNorth around Northern Ireland
Mar 092015
 

If the stars were a musical instrument, how would they sound? As the Earth spins on its axis, and day becomes night becomes day, our view on the near universe changes as reflected by 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 one complete revolution. Robert Jarvis’ aroundNorth is an eight-channel sound installation created entirely in Kyma 7 that offers listeners an opportunity to hear this phenomenon in real time. As each star crosses one of the equally spaced virtual lines emanating from Celestial North Pole, a sound associated with that star and its characteristics is heard at the corresponding position in the sky, its size, its distance from Earth, its brightness and its temperature, creating a mesmerizing sound map of the universe as viewed by our turning planet.

aroundNorth, will be touring Northern Ireland throughout the month of March 2015, culminating in the work’s permanent installation at Armagh Observatory. The tour begins on the shores of Lough Neagh, at Oxford Island, the first Dark Sky site in Northern Ireland, proceed to the top of Divis & the Black Mountain National Trust Park, and then on to Armagh. The installation will also travel to Colin Allotments in West Belfast before travelling to Derry for a special performance to coincide with the deep partial eclipse of the sun on the morning of Friday 20th March 2015. There will then be an evening performance in the sports grounds at St Cecila’s College before the final event at the spectacular Beaghmore Stones complex, near Cookstown in County Tyrone.

By mapping the parameters of the stars through the medium of sound, aroundNorth changes the way we think about our stellar neighbors. As stars move across the score’s virtual lines, brighter stars sound longer, fading in and fading out as they move across the score’s virtual lines, while fainter stars sound shorter; stars that are closer sound louder; hotter stars crackle corresponding to their heat; and, bigger stars sound deeper whilst smaller stars are higher sounding.

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.

Scroll down for a full schedule of when and where you can experience aroundNorth this month.

THU 12
Lough Neagh Discovery Centre, Oxford Island, Craigavon BT66 6NJ
FREE 7pm – 9pm

SAT 14
Divis & the Black Mountain, Divis Road, Hannahstown BT17 0NG
FREE 6.30pm – 9pm (Approx 20 minute walk to installation area)

TUE 17
Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG
FREE 2.30pm – 4pm

WED 18
Colin Allotments, Upper Colin Glen Rd, Belfast BT17 0LR
FREE 7pm – 9pm

THU 19
Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG
FREE 2.30pm – 4pm

FRI 20
St Cecilia’s College Sports Ground, Fanad Drive, Derry BT48 9QE
FREE 7pm – 9pm

SAT 21
Beaghmore Stones, Blackrock Road, Cookstown BT80 9PB
FREE 6pm – 9pm (Visitors required to walk over rough ground)

MON 23 & EVERY MON, TUE, WED, THU & FRI until further notice
Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG
FREE 9.30am – 5pm

Kyma meets Buchla

 Broadcast / Webcast, Event, Sound Recording  Comments Off on Kyma meets Buchla
Feb 112015
 

Roland_Kuit_Buchla_200_EMS_Stockholm_7On February 25, composer/synthesis-researcher Roland Kuit will be broadcasting live and in stereo from EMS in Stockholm for the Dutch Concertzender Radio, demonstrating his work with Kyma and the Buchla 200 interacting with each other in EMS Studio 4.

At the heart of these compositions are the Kyma algorithms that Kuit uses to frequency-modulate the Buchla Complex Waveform Generator Model 259 which, in turn, is used as trigger function for the Sequential Voltage Source Model 243, thus exploring the intriguing area that lies between note triggers and wavetables. This sequential control voltage is controlling a second Complex Waveform Generator Model 259. And the audio of this Waveform Generator is used as the carrier for the 285e Frequency Shifter / Balanced Modulator. The 266e Source of Uncertainty modulates a third Complex Waveform Generator Model 259 and is used as modulation signal for the Balanced Modulator which is fed through 296e Spectral Processor for filtering. Finally the loop is closed by routing these algorithmic audio ‘sentences’ back to Kyma for Ring Modulation and quadraphonic placement.

Kuit is a frequent guest on the Concertzender where he’s often called in as a modular synthesis expert to explain various synthesis algorithms or to discuss music by some of the pioneers of electronic music.

EMS#1 will stream live on 25 February after which it will be available as a podcast from the Concertzender archive.

Moved by magnets

 Album, Event, Release, Sound Recording  Comments Off on Moved by magnets
Jul 282014
 

SGR^CAV is a collaboration between composers Cristian Vogel and SØS Gunver Ryberg, exploring a phase space of possible musics, where phantasmagorical sound objects emerge from transient combinations of multi-dimensional parameters.

In January 2014 the duo SGR^CAV released their debut recording MOVED BY MAGNETS on the cassette label Tapeworm.

These works for cassette were composed from the precise arrangement of a number of elements—such as field recordings of coal  mining machinery in the arctic mountains, and the creaking of ancient trees in Denmark—combined with digital processing—such as self-similar additive synthesis and granulations—all developed in Kyma. Many of the other characteristic timbres were created using vintage studio technology. An awareness of the sonic qualities of the compact cassette medium was also an important factor in the composition.

Listening to the album feels like exploring a mysterious world with its own, alien yet self-consistent, laws of physics with faint echoes from the Columbia-Princeton Music Center of the 1960s.

What if the stars made music

 Concert, Data-driven sound, Event, Installation, Science  Comments Off on What if the stars made music
Jan 282014
 

Outdoor Culture presents Sounds of the Night Sky featuring Robert Jarvis‘ sound installation: aroundNorth, opening Thursday 20 February 2014 6.30-9.30 pm at the National Trust Stowe New Inn Farm Buckingham MK18 5EQ

This outdoor event will showcase the premier of Robert Jarvis’ new sound art installation, aroundNorth, a piece that was shortlisted for the 2010 PRS New Music Award.  A multi-speaker sound map of the stars driven by the turning of the Earth, aroundNorth uses Kyma to transform the night sky into a celestial music box rotating around Polaris, the North Star. As each star passes a virtual line in the sky, it triggers a musical note whose qualities are determined by the star’s spectrum, mass, brightness and distance from earth, creating a mesmerising sound map of the universe as viewed from our rotating planet.

Visitors will be accompanied down Bell Gate Drive on foot and into the gardens of Stowe after dark, before entering the semi-wilderness of the newly-opened Lamport Garden where the sounds of moving stars will be created like a giant celestial music box! Dress for the outdoors and bring a flashlight!  Click here for more information and tickets.

A script shaped more by sound than words

 Film, Release, Sound Design, Sound for picture, Sound Recording  Comments Off on A script shaped more by sound than words
Oct 142013
 

“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”.

Welcome to This New World

 Album, Broadcast / Webcast, Concert, Event, Release, Sound Recording  Comments Off on Welcome to This New World
Jul 082013
 

For the better part of a decade, jazz pianist/composer Stanley Cowell has become increasingly intrigued with the challenge of incorporating live electronics into the context of acoustic jazz — not electronics for its own sake — but electronics that add something meaningful to the music. In Cowell’s latest album, Welcome to This New World (SteepleChase SCCD 31757) he fully embraces the use of real-time signal processing and synthesis; Kyma has subtly infiltrated nearly every track “in ways that excite and disorient and offer a new dimension to improvisation,” to quote Chicago-based jazz reviewer Neil Tesser.

Welcome to This New World is a live album, no overdubbing, no post-production magic; every performance you hear on the album can be replicated on stage in real time… and will be this July 15 2013 at 7:30 pm in Hartford’s Bushnell Park at a free outdoor concert sponsored by the Hartford Jazz society and simulcast live on WWUH FM.

Cowell’s Empathlectrik Quartet features Vic Juris (guitar) and includes Tom DiCarlo (bass) and Chris Brown (drums), both of whom studied with Cowell at Rutgers. According to Cowell, Kyma acts as the fifth member of the Empathlectric Quartet.

Welcome to This New World

AN OVERSEAS MEMORY eases you gently into the new world, with subtle, theremin-esque touches over jazz guitar, bass, piano. Relaxed yet precise, the music puts you by the water’s edge at sunset, with smooth dissolves through interesting rhythmic disintegrations and repeating downward major thirds.

By the time we arrive at track 2, TINGED, the coddling is officially over and we’re thrust into the brave new world, harmonically, rhythmically and timbrally. Each note is distorted by ragged amplitude modulation. The piano emits showers of particles and distorted accents in an easy BPM 90 with tricky beat displacements and slightly disorienting live pitch bending.

VICTIM is fun, fast and boppish (16th notes at BPM 60?), the piano processing takes on a vocal quality that sounds like spectral voices. Some of the solos venture into territory heard only at electro-acoustic music concerts. A guitar solo is doubled by a delayed, ghost guitar, and the piano stabs sounds, at times, completely electronic. The abrupt ending sizzles into a noise decay.

Jazz critic Neil Tesser describes describes VICTIM as “instantly traversing the gulf between post-boppish improvisation and post-post-modernism”. Yeah! With another “post” thrown in for good measure!

The exquisite DUO IMPROVISATION I is just piano and guitar processed through Kyma. The entire track is filtered through a time-stretched vocoder/RE on the spoken phrase: “We pray for peace”, repeating and elaborated through metric and harmonic modulations. On this track, Kyma functions as a third performer: a prism through which you hear the other two performers! Fluid and ever-changing, the phrase morphs into an insistent invocation for peace, before easing back into a contemplative ending. Reflective, haunting and beautiful, this track bears repeated listening to appreciate just how musically innovative it really is.

EMPATHLECTRIK is a Cowell neologism derived from “Empathy + Electric”. In this track, Kyma sounds are incorporated into the theme itself and, as Tesser observes, Kyma “enhances the improvisation without overwhelming it.” The piano moves in and out of subtle modulation, there are theremin-like touches on the guitar, arpeggiated piano clusters pitch-shifted up. It sounds like it’s been multi-tracked and processed, but it’s all live! The New World has arrived.

Live spectral analysis and resynthesis of the piano through the Kyma CloudBank provides shimmery prolongations of the guitar and piano pitches in INVERTISEMENT. A sudden shift to the dry piano sounds sounds so focused and new; it makes you realize that hearing the processed piano lets you hear the dry piano with new ears; you no longer take any sound for granted.

During the unprocessed interludes, you have a chance to reflect on and appreciate the economy and precision of Cowell’s playing. Complex and masterful, his playing remains disciplined and focused, even when veering off into timbral new worlds. There’s never an extraneous note or gratuitous ornament. Similarly, the seeming ease with which Juris’ fingers fly over the fingerboard evidences a calm serenity that can only come from years of practice and total mastery.

This track, like the others, is formally solid, notwithstanding the wild timbral excursions.

After the solos, a reprise of the shimmery clouds. The reason these electronics feel so organic is precisely because they emerge entirely from the acoustic performance. They’re not played on a sequencer or a synthesizer, they are played on a real acoustic piano and subtly processed through the electronics. Thus, the resulting sound feels totally different from a synthesized track.

Picking up the pace and the mood again is SUN BURN which Neil Tesser describes as “shades of Weather Report”. The piano resynthesis has a decidedly vocal flavor, suggesting a female vocalist doubling the piano. This would be a good one to listen to while cruising down the highway and includes a rock-worthy drum solo.

In DUO IMPROVISATION II, you are suspended, drifting through space, with gentle electronics and atmospheric processing. Washes of quick arpeggios and Debussy-esque scales are held together by a subtle G pedal drone.

ST CROIX opens with cheery island percussion and ostinati. Bubbly, liquid processing alternates with straightforward sections and the metallic overtones of an acoustic thumb piano, this is one to listen to through ear buds while strolling down summer streets downtown.

With WINTER REFLECTIONS, the desolation of winter returns. Dry snow swirling like dust across dark streets, and shivery scraping on piano strings and cymbals coalesce into the theme stated in guitar and conversationally commented on by the piano. A slightly melancholic piano solo w/ tremolo, recovers with a strong bass line leading into the next chorus. There’s a delightfully high-pitched, fast bass solo with some light touches from electronics, a reprise of solo in guitar with piano commentary, and it ends with piano string-scraping and thermin sounds.

WELCOME TO THIS NEW WORLD features octave doubling, unisons, swinging syncopations, subtly warped resynthesis and disorienting non-sinusoidal resynthesis that gives the piano a harpsichord-like quality. The Theremins and piano wire scrapes return. By now we are solidly in the new world.

Stanley Cowell and Kyma

Cowell’s fascination with electronic music was first ignited when, as a sophomore at Oberlin College, he heard a lecture by Karlheinz Stockhausen. Cowell was struck by Stockhausen’s observation that once any music is recorded, it becomes electro-acoustic music. Cowell kept coming back to that idea, throughout the 1960s as a jazz performer and into the 1980s as he turned more toward composition. It wasn’t until 1997 when, as a professor at Lehman College in New York, he had an opportunity to write a grant to purchase one of the early Kyma systems.

He’s been using Kyma in his music ever since, but it wasn’t until the new, more portable, Paca was released that he began taking it on the road. “It’s a sound design workstation,” Cowell says of Kyma, differentiating it from other computer programs or electronic keyboard instruments, “basically, if you look at every real-time device that does something to sound, Kyma does all of that.”

 

During the recordings (and in live performances) Cowell sends the guitar signal to the left Kyma input and piano signal to the right input. Juris has his own foot controllers, while Cowell controls and initiates Kyma Sounds from his MacBook Pro. (Bass and drums are not processed). The result is like nothing you have heard before. Yet it never loses its grounding in acoustic jazz. Welcome to This New World is new music that sounds like nothing you’ve heard before.

Zul Zelub: Ultimaton

 Release, Sound Recording, Web site  Comments Off on Zul Zelub: Ultimaton
Feb 092013
 

Ultimaton, an experimental electro-acoustic album featuring prepared piano and Kyma X processing, was released in December 2012 by Jorge Lima Barreto (piano & percussion) and Jonas Runa (Kyma X).

Zul Zelub (zul = luz or light, zelub = Boulez) is described as unrealized musical energy, the unexpressed, the force which does not generate matter, a virtual formulation as in a dream or a cyber journey.

Barreto’s piano performance is an experimentalist improvised flow, unfolding in various concepts and dynamics of time (slowed-down or accelerated, asynchronous and synchronous) creating new sound spaces. Digital musician and composer João Marques Carrilho (aka Jonas Runa) captures, interferes, superimposes timbres, and participates in a real-time musical conversation with the piano.

The duo explores the questions: What lies behind an act of musical creation?  What precedes it?  What enables its actualization in sound?

To Barreto and Runa, musical improvisation is a living force that induces an action and maintains a momentary state of the body.  “Improvisation lives in the unknown, at the mercy of the Creative Energy and Open Form; in it’s aesthetic stance, improvisation is possibility and performance (corporal action) – it is an ephemeral state pointing to the unrealized.”

Ultimaton is available as an immediate download or in a limited edition cardboard double-sleeve wallet that includes photographs and background on the project and its creators. Listen to a preview of the complex, delicate and shimmering textures on bandcamp.com where you can also order the full album.

© 2012 the eighth nerve Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha