Official organ of the Symbolic Sound Corporation
What would happen if you sat the designers of Reaktor, the LinnStrument, Ableton Live, and Kyma down together on a couch and asked them to talk about how music influences technology, how technology influences music, and what exactly is a musical instrument anyway? That’s what happened at the 2015 Loop Summit. Dennis DeSantis (author of Making Music and moderator of the discussion) wrote this summary with video clips.
Since childhood, composer/performer Franz Danksagmüller has been fascinated with the rich, interesting sound palette one can create from broken, discarded and so-called unplayable instruments. In 2013, on a visit to a local junkyard, he noticed a strange metal object that immediately captured his attention.
Read the story of how he added contact mics and sensors and developed a bowing technique to transform this strange object (which he later discovered was part of a device for food preservation) into a new musical instrument that sends both audio and MIDI control data to Kyma.
You can hear this mysterious and beautiful instrument performed live at KISS2016, when Danksagmüller and composer/performer/computer scientist John Mantegna perform their new piece — The Artificial Brain!
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
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.
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.
Composer/sound designer Silvia Matheus is one of the presenters on the scientific program of the 12th International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research (CMMR2016) in São Paulo, Brazil on 05-08 July 2016. Matheus’ talk, State of Art in Sound Design, Production and Synthesis will include an opportunity for conference attendees to learn more about how Silvia uses Kyma in her sound design and composition work and to interact directly with her Kyma 7/Pacarana system.
The latest incarnation of Doom features “badass demons, big effing guns, and moving really fast” and thanks to sound designer/composer/writer Chad Mossholder, Kyma-enhanced sound design!
Extreme sound design, radical electronic music, and the impending hardware revolution — Darwin Grosse recently sat down with Symbolic Sound’s Carla Scaletti, and the resulting conversation took some unexpected turns. Listen to the full podcast on Darwin Grosse’s Art + Music + Technology podcast.
Emergence — it’s what a complex system of interconnected agents can do collectively that they could not do in isolation. Emergence goes beyond the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts — emergence arises from the relationships among those parts. Emergence is that seemingly magical moment when an unanticipated novel behavior or dynamic pattern arises from a complex network of simple components and rules.
Symbolic Sound, in partnership with De Montfort University’s Faculty of Art, Design and Humanities; the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, and the Performance Research Group, invite you to participate in the eighth annual Kyma International Sound Symposium and to explore emergence with an international gathering of Kyma practitioners ranging from experts to aspiring experts and including many who have never used Kyma before and are simply curious.
Get the inspiration, support and professional connections to motivate and energize you for the rest of the year. Join us at the Kyma International Sound Symposium (KISS2016) — 7-10 September 2016 in Leicester, UK — as we explore the concept of “Emergence†through 4 days and nights of words, live musical performances, open labs, and interactive discussions.
Unique features of this year’s program include an improvised conduction performance by the Emergent Ensemble; a 3-D sound immersion lecture/concert in De Montfort University’s 20+ speaker DOME; a 3-D film with a live sound track; workshops on ecosystemic composition; collaborations across international and disciplinary borders; and a celebratory club concert featuring live Kyma with acoustic instruments, vocals and analog synthesis.
Live performances featuring some of the most cutting edge music composed with Kyma this year, lectures where Kyma practitioners share their insights and reveal a few of their secrets, master classes and labs led by the creators of Kyma; and the unparalleled camaraderie and inspiration from your fellow sound and music explorers — these are some of the regular features of KISS that inspire people to return to KISS year after year.
Explore the full program here: http://kiss2016.symbolicsound.com/program/
Register now to immerse yourself in the fun, hands-on creative technology environment that will inspire you for years to come! http://kiss2016.symbolicsound.com/kiss2016-registration
Based on current registration levels, we are anticipating a record turn-out this year. So please be sure to reserve your spot by registering as soon as possible. Do it today so it doesn’t get forgotten on your to-do list. (Please be advised that there is a strict upper limit on attendance based on the venue sizes). Thanks!
Photos by Belinda B Carr.
NeverEngine Labs (Cristian Vogel and Gustav Scholda) have announced a new set of classes and tools for creating and manipulating multicycle wavetables and audiofiles with embedded markers in Kyma 7. The new ROM tools can be used for creating multisample players and to prepare audio files for morphing oscillators, grain envelopes and wavetable libraries.
Available from: http://www.cristianvogel.com/neverenginelabs/product/rom-tools