Remote collaboration, telematic performances, and online learning

Networked collaboration, telematic performances, and online learning have been growing in popularity for several years, but the lockdowns and social-distancing guidelines precipitated by the global COVID-19 pandemic have accelerated the adoption of these modes of interaction. This is a brief (and evolving) report on some of the solutions your fellow Kyma-nauts have found for practicing creative collaborations, live performances, private tutoring, consulting, and teaching large online courses. Thanks for sharing your input, feedback and alternative solutions for distance-collaboration with the Kyma community!

Note: For example configurations showing how to get audio onto your computer and out onto a network, read this first.

Kyma Kata

One of the earliest ongoing examples is Alan Jackson’s Kyma Kata, a regular meeting of peers who practice Kyma programming together, that has been operating online in Google Hangouts for over a year before the crisis and recently celebrated their 100th session! (Did they know something the rest of the world didn’t?) The Kyma Kata currently meets twice a week, on Mondays and Tuesdays. They begin each session with “Prime Minister’s Question Time” (open question-and-answer session on how to do specific tasks in Kyma), followed by an exercise that each person works on independently for 30 minutes, after which they share and discuss their results. Ostensibly the session lasts for 2 hours, but when people really get interested in a problem, some of them stick with it for much longer (though there is no honor lost if someone has to leave after two hours).

Alan Jackson and the Tuesday Night Kyma Kata
Collaboration platform

The Kata use Google Meet (née Hangouts) for their meetings, primarily because it seems to work on everyone’s computer and it integrates well with Slack. To start a Hangout, they just type /hangout into the Slack channel.

Audio from Kyma

Kata participants focus on how to do something together, so screen-sharing is important and audio quality has been less important: they often play over the air, using the computer’s built-in microphone to send the audio.

Tuesday Kyma Kata: Andreas, Ben, Jason, Opal, Pete, Domenico, Simon, & Charlie
Andreas, Ben, Jason, Opal, Pete, Domenico, Simon & Charlie

 

For higher quality audio, Alan uses a small USB mixer plugged in to the Mac as the Hangouts audio source. Using the mixer, he can mix the Paca’s output and a microphone which provides a lot better quality than over-the-air through the laptop’s mic, although it’s still limited by Hangout’s audio quality, delay and bandwidth.

What is the Kata and How do I sign up?

The term, kata, which comes to us by way of karate, has been adopted by software engineers as a way to regularly practice their craft together by picking a problem and finding several different solutions. The point of a kata is not so much arriving at a correct answer as it is to practice the art of programming.

In the Kyma Kata, a group of aspiring Kymanistas come together regularly via teleconferencing  and the facilitator (Alan) introduces an exercise that everyone works independently for about half an hour, after which people take turns talking about their solutions. All levels of Kyma ability are welcome, so why not join the fun?

Improvisation with the Unpronounceables

The Unpronounceables are Robert Efroymson in Santa Fe New Mexico, Ilker Isikyakar in Albuquerque New Mexico, and Will Klingenmeier (ordinarily based in Colorado, but due to travel restrictions, on extended lockdown in Yerevan Armenia). To prepare for a live improvisation planned for KISS 2020, Robert proposed setting up some remote sessions using Jamulus.

The Unpronounceables
Collaboration platform

Using the Jamulus software, musicians can engage in real-time improvisation sessions over the Internet. A single server running the Jamulus server software collects audio data from each Jamulus client, mixes the audio data and sends the mix back to each client. Initially, Robert set up a private server for the group, but they now use one of the public Jamulus servers as an alternative. One of the amusing side-effects of using the public server is that they are occasionally joined by uninvited random guests who start jamming with them.

During a session, the Unpronounceables use a Slack channel to communicate with each other by text and Jamulus to time-align and mix the three audio sources and for sending the mix to each of the three locations.

Audio from Kyma

Each Unpronounceable uses a second interface to get audio from Kyma to the host computer. Robert uses a Behringer to come out of Kyma, and an IO/2 to get to his Mac. Ilker sends his MOTU Track 16 audio outputs to a Behringer; then selects the Behringer as an I/O in the Jamulus preference tab. Will uses a ZOOM H4n as his Kyma interface and sends the audio to an M-Audio Fast Track Pro which acts as the interface for Jamulus.

Ecosystemic audio in virtual rooms

Scott Miller and Pat O’Keefe’s HDPHN project has always been an exploration of what it means to be alone together — it’s a live public concert where each member of the audience wears headphones, rather than listening through speakers. When stay-at-home orders made it impossible for Scott in Otsego to meet in person with Pat in St. Paul, Minnesota, they started looking into how to move the live HDPHN performance onto the Internet.

 

When Earth Day Art Model 2020 shifted from a live to an online festival, Scott and Pat used this as an opportunity to dive in and perform HDPHN along with one of their older pieces Zeitgeist live through the Internet.

 

 

Audio from Kyma

Scott describes the audio routing for HDPHN as follows:

Pat’s mic comes over Zoom and out of my desktop headphone audio. It also goes into Kyma input 1 on my Traveller. With Zoom, I can’t get/send stereo from a live source. With two people (did this Friday) I bring the second person in on a separate Skype/Zoom/Facetime session on another device, and into Kyma input 2. With 2 inputs, I then mathematically cross-processing them in a virtual room.

I am sending Kyma’s processed/mixed output (Main 1-2) back into my desktop via Lynx E22 audio card, going into DSP-Quattro for compression and EQ, then to iShowU virtual audio interface 1) —> to Zoom for Pat’s monitoring, and 2) —>OBS and then to YouTube synced with Pat’s Zoom video. YouTube latency very bad and it wrecked chamber music with duo, but was fun for free improv with a different duo.

Live coding at a Virtual Club

On Monday, 11 May 2020, beginning at 20.30 CET Time, Lucretio will be live-coding in Kyma using a new Tool of his own design at The Circle UXR Zone. The Circle is a virtual club that is a UXR.zone — a decentralized social VR communication platform offering secure communication, free from user-tracking and ads. A spinoff project of the #30daysinVR transhumanist performance by Enea Le Fons, a UXR.zone allows participants to share virtual rooms and communicate via avatars across a range of devices: from VR headsets (main platform) to desktop and mobile phone browsers.

The avatars of people attending the UXR events are either anonymous (robots) or follow a strict dress code based on the CVdazzle research to stress the importance of cyber camouflage via aesthetics against dystopian surveillance measures happening in the real world. Click to enter the club

The belly of the BEAST

Simon Smith (who is actually quite a slender chap at the BEAST of Birmingham) has recently been tasked with researching online collaboration platforms for the BEAST, so we asked him for some tips from the front lines. He just completed a Sound and Music Workshop with Ximena Alarcon (earlier he helped Alarcon on a telematic performance using the Jacktrip software from Stanford).

In the workshop, she also mentioned:

  • Artsmesh A network music and performance management tool. Content creators run the Artsmesh client which streams live media point-to-point; audiences run a light Artsmesh client to watch the shows.
  • SoundJack is a realtime communication system with adjustable quality and latency parameters. Depending on the physical distance, network capacities, network conditions and routing, some degree of musical interaction is possible.
  • Jitsi,  an open source teleconferencing platform

Other options?

How have you been collaborating, teaching, consulting, creating during the lockdown? We’re interested in hearing your stories, solutions and experiences.

Have you used YouTube or Vimeo for live streaming with Kyma?

What’s your preferred video conferencing software for sending computer audio (Zoom, BigBlueButton, Meet)?

Have you been using remote desktop software (like Chrome Remote Desktop, Jump) to access your studio computer from home?

We welcome hearing about alternate solutions for this ongoing report.

Anna Martinova releases Dusha II

Anna Martinova
DJ, producer, and graphic designer, Anna Martinova, has just signed with a new publisher who will be releasing her new album Dusha II in April 2017 and following up with videos and other artist collaborations. Watch Anna’s new web site for details on upcoming releases and live shows. Here’s a teaser for Dusha II drenched with mesmerizing and mysterious Kyma sounds:

Martinova works by generating WAV files in Kyma, arranging them in Logic, adding melodic lines created with Alchemy, and layering in recorded vocals using Logic and has linked her DAW with RolandCloud.

…Kyma (Pacarana) is very special tool, i am happy to be introduced to this system. It boosts up my creativity, inspiring me in every sound atom i generate with it, and the machine is limitless. The quality i have on the output is so powerful, clean and unique. I grow with it.

Known as Tulpa for her dark progressive DJ sets and Dusha for her chill out / ambient music, Anna got her start at age 17 as a vocalist in a rock band. After shifting to the psy-trance scene, she now lives in Amsterdam where she continues live DJing and producing.

Here’s a taste of her alter-ego, Tulpa:

The rocket scientist of human hearing

In 1999, astrophysicist/musician David McClain spent an intense three-month period working on The Northern Sky Survey, mapping the sky in the near infrared while getting by on an hour of sleep per night. When he finished the survey, he was suddenly struck by a viral infection that nearly killed him; his doctors were never able to determine the cause and, after three months, the infection dissipated almost as quickly as it had appeared. But afterward David noticed that he could no longer understand his wife when she was speaking to him. He went to an audiologist and discovered he had a sensorineural hearing loss of 60-70 dB in the high frequency range. Hearing aids helped him understand speech, but he was devastated to discover that music never sounded right through the hearing aids. But as a physicist, he was determined to solve the problem.

Motivated by his love of music and informed by his scientific training, McClain has spent the last 16 years developing equations to describe the entire hearing experience – from the cochlea, to the afferent 8th nerve, to processing in the central nervous system, efferent 8th nerve interactions — and developing signal processing algorithms to adapt to and compensate for his hearing loss in a way that preserves the audio experience of music. The result is a collection of signal processing algorithms he calls Crescendo. Kyma is one of the tools David uses for testing out new ideas and prototyping them for Crescendo.

Now he’s blogging about his findings on his web site http://refined-audiometrics.com. In keeping with his motto “Keeping music enjoyable for all!” David hopes that his experiences, research findings, and extensive set of algorithms can benefit others.

 

Imagining spaces

You won’t hear a single starting pistol or popped balloon in Matteo Milani’s Imagined Spaces impulse response library. Instead, the film sound designer imagined and synthesized the impulse responses of imaginary spaces using Kyma 7.

As a result, Imagined Spaces can do more than imbue your tracks with air, depth, and new perspective; it also expands and transforms the original material into something entirely new, something that’s never been heard before — like listening to your tracks in venues that exist only in the mind of the sound designer.

Strange loops

In Steven Johnson‘s upcoming book, Wonderland: How play made the modern world, he includes a chapter on the connection between musical instrument design and technological innovation. In this episode of his Wonderland podcast, he asks how and why it is that some experimental sounds find their way into the musical mainstream. With special guests Brian Eno, Alex Ross, Caroline Shaw, Carla Scaletti, and Antenes.

Conjuring with Kyma

Take a nighttime walk through the densely forested uncanny valley of Barton McLean’s imagination, where sounds become amplifiers of horror or wonder, and symphonic landscapes insinuate animal cries and wilderness. Barton McLean’s Night Conjuror is the latest in his series of evocative scores with suggestive accompanying visuals (as McLean reminds us, the visuals are there to set a mood only — the sound is the primary focus).

My goal is to always let the electronic sounds mimic the real world, and the real world sounds mimic the electronic. It is only since I have been working with Kyma 7 that this goal has been realized to the extent I hoped someday it would.

—Barton McLean          

Live from the subconscious of Barton McLean

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.

Liberda, La Berge, and the angels

Bruno Liberda promises to provide another small piece of the puzzle that is the angel universe: A non-singing actor, words that unfold as a monk singing, a new episode of l’angelo della voce awaits. Follow the evolution of this piece on line.

Then, a concert in Vienna for live electronics and flute with Bruno Liberda & Anne La Berge:

Musik für Gönner, Bruno Liberda
Weg nach C, Bruno Liberda
Utter, Anne La Berge

Sunday, July 5 at 21h
Elektro Gönner
Mariahilferstrasse 101 / Schulhofpassage
1060 Wien

The concert is smoke-free to protect the flutist (and the other angels).

Spectral eye of the Kyma guy

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Gustav Scholda, a.k.a. kymaguy, has just released an extensive set of spectral processing modules, sharing them with the Kyma community! The modules are free with an option to donate through PayPal if you’d like to support further development.

With names like FormantShifter, FractalNoise, PartialDerange, SpectralCentroid and many others, the Scholda modules are encapsulations of signal flows designed to analyze and process the output of live or recorded Kyma spectral sources.

Gustav is also available for private consulting, coaching, and custom module design to help you customize your own spectral processing ideas in Kyma.  In fact, he’s already posted the first of a series of tutorials on how to use his spectral modules: PitchShifting/Bending using the Product1 Module

NeverEngine Labsâ„¢ For Kyma Seven

Build your Kyma 7 mastery and increase your sources of creative inspiration by subscribing to NeverEngine Labs, Cristian Vogel‘s newly launched subscription service offering tools, resources, private instruction, and consulting opportunities designed to help enhance your Kyma 7 productivity and creativity.

NeverEngine Labs offers several “Labs”, each one focused on a different area of the Kyma 7 universe. The Labs are designed to inspire you with creative ideas for music composition and sound design as well expand your knowledge of the power and capabilities of the new Kyma 7.

These Labs are not fixed in function or design (like plug-ins or presets); instead, as a participant, you are encouraged to deconstruct and recombine the Sounds and their inner elements. Help is provided through live communication channels where you, Cristian and fellow subscribers can discuss the content of each Lab and receive regular updates with notes. Subscribing to a NeverEngine Lab is an invitation to engage in listening, curiosity and experimentation, all at your own pace!

Find out how Cristian can help you, your band, or your in-house team get the most from your Kyma system with custom-made workflows and designs.

To find out more about the labs and upcoming announcements, visit NeverEngine Labs.