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.

 

Soap Bubbles and Kyma 7

Composer/producer Miguel Gil is working on new improvisation project featuring Kyma 7 and the poems of Fernando Pessoa

In this video, featuring Lucía Flor-Laguna (voice), Jorge Cabadas (guitar) and Miguel Gil (Kyma 7 and sax), you can see Miguel using a Wacom tablet to elegantly perform a synthesis model and to process and capture the audio from the other performers using Kyma 7.

Here’s the poem:

Las pompas de jabón
(Fernando Pessoa)

Las pomas de jabón que este chiquillo
se entretiene en soltar por la pajita
son, traslúcidamente, toda una filosofía.
Claras, inútiles y pasajeras como la Naturaleza,
amigas de los ojos como las cosas,
son lo que son
con una precisión redondita y aérea,
y nadie, ni aun el niño que las suelta,
pretende que sean más que lo que parecen ser.
Algunas apenas se ven en el aire lúcido.
Son como la brisa, que apenas roza las flores al pasar
y de la que tan sólo sabemos que pasa
porque algo se aligera en nosotros
y todo lo acepta más nítidamente.

Kyma morphing workshop in London

Have you ever wanted to do audio morphing like this?

 

UK Kyma Users’ group organizer Simon Smith announces that the second meeting of the group will take place at the University of West London, Ealing on the Saturday 20th of February from 10:30 am to 4:30pm and will feature a morphing masterclass by Pete Johnston.

DSC00095

Simon Smith

Charlie Norton, Kyma user and senior lecturer at University of West London, has generously agreed to host the event at the University music studios. The day will consist of a Masterclass/Workshop in the morning then after lunch, mingling, brainstorming and sharing of Kyma tips and hints. Also this will be an ideal opportunity to talk to the local organisers of this year’s Kyma International Sound Symposium (KISS2016) in Leicester UK: Craig Vear and Simon Smith.

If you would like to morph your own sounds at the workshop, please bring your Kyma system with headphones and some sound files you wish to morph.

To reserve a space, please email organizer Simon Smith.

Acoustic guitar, live Kyma processing concerts

Guitarist Dan Lippel and composer Scott Miller are collaborating on several upcoming concerts in St. Cloud and Minneapolis Minnesota featuring acoustic guitar and live interactive processing of the guitar and the acoustics of the space through Kyma:

January 15, 2016 @ 8pm @ The Nest Above the Pickled Loon (St. Cloud, MN)

January 16, 2016 @ 8pm Gut, Lungs, & Silicon (Minneapolis)

January 17, 2016 @ 7pm @ The Nicollet (Minneapolis)

QUANTUM in India

Award-winning choreographer Gilles Jobin‘s piece, QUANTUM, will be on tour in India at the end of November through early December 2015. Inspired by Jobin’s residency at the CERN laboratory for high-energy physics, the piece incorporates a lumino-kinetic sculpture by Julius von Bismarck and a multichannel Kyma soundscape by Carla Scaletti that includes sonified data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN performed live by Marie Predour.

Gilles Jobin and his dance company will perform in:

Bangalore on the 26th and 27th of November 2015 at Chowdiah Memorial Hall
New Delhi on 4th and 5th December 2015 at Kamani Auditorium

Gilles Jobin will also lead choreography workshops for dance professionals, students, scholars and/or scientists around the idea of “movement generators” developed during his CERN residency and the creation of QUANTUM:

Bangalore workshop at Attakalari on 26th and 27th of November
Delhi workshop Danceworx on 3rd and 4th of December

The workshops and performances are part of a larger Swissnex India festival of inspiring science, art and innovation.

NeverEngine Labs & Kyma 7 workshop in Milan

Cristian Vogel will be at Dude Club in Milan to present a free workshop on his NeverEngine Labs for Kyma 7:

Saturday 28 November 2015 from 16.00 to 18.00
Dude Club – via Boncompagni, 44 Milano

The workshop is free but space is limited to 25 participants, so please register early if you’d like to ensure your place in the workshop!

Access to the NeverEngine Labs virtual laboratories is through a monthly or yearly subscription; each lab is a library of sounds and instruments for Kyma 7, and each month, they focus on a different aspect of sound design, so you can get a taste of the limitless continuum of sound design that is Kyma 7.

Kyma 7 support for LinnStrument and MPE

Kyma 7 now offers plug-and-play support for Roger Linn Design’s LinnStrument and other MPE-enabled MIDI instruments. Kyma automatically puts the LinnStrument into MPE mode when you connect it via USB-MIDI or MIDI 5-pin DIN (or via your computer, using Delora Software’s Kyma Connect). Once connected, any keyboard-controlled Sound in Kyma automatically sets the polyphony and responds to the LinnStrument — no extra controllers are needed, and you don’t have to select a special mode on the LinnStrument — so you just plug it in, and play.

What is MPE?

Traditional MIDI note events have two dimensions — pitch and velocity — neither of which can be altered directly with the fingers once the key has gone down. But musicians performing with live electronics are driving the demand for new electronic instruments — instruments whose touch, reliability, sensitivity, and responsiveness can begin to approach those of traditional acoustic instruments.

Over the last 10-15 years, more and more instrument makers have sought to incorporate continuous control over pitch and velocity and to add a third dimension of continuous control: timbre. One of the earliest entries in this new category was the Continuum fingerboard from Haken Audio (which has had plug-and-play support in Kyma since 2001). More recently, Madrona Labs (Soundplane), Eigenlabs (Eigenharp), ROLI (Seaboard), and Roger Linn Design (LinnStrument) have been offering “keyboard-like” instruments that provide three dimensions of expressive, continuous control per finger.

But how is it possible to send these three-dimensional continuous polyphonic MIDI notes to a sound engine? Haken Audio first used a FireWire protocol before switching over to a proprietary, optimized MIDI protocol. Symbolic Sound and Madrona Labs used Open Sound Control (OSC) for Kyma Control and Soundplane, respectively. But the growing proliferation of new instruments and proprietary protocols was threatening to become a nightmare for soft-and-hardware synthesizer makers to support.

Enter software developer Geert Bevin who, in January of this year, started working with key industry professionals on a new, more expressive MIDI specification called MPE: Multidimensional Polyphonic Expression. The new MPE standard has already been implemented on Roger Linn Design’s LinnStrument, the Madrona Labs Soundplane, the ROLI Rise Seaboard, and several other instrument makers are currently in the process of adding an MPE-mode to their instruments.

With MPE, the music industry now has a standard protocol for communicating between expressive controllers and the sound hardware and software capable of sonically expressing the subtlety, responsiveness, and live interaction offered by these controllers.

Kyma — Interactive, responsive, and live

Kyma, with its legendary audio quality, vast synthesis codebase and deep access to detailed parameter control, is the ideal sound engine to pair with these new, more responsive controller interfaces for live expressive performance, and Symbolic Sound has a long history of working with instrument makers to provide tight, seamless integration and bi-directional communication between these new instruments and Kyma.

In addition to its graphical signal flow editor, file editors, and Sound Library, Kyma 7 also provides several environments in which you can create an instrument where the synthesis, processing, parameter-mapping, and even the mode of interaction can evolve over time during a performance:

  • In the Multigrid (displayed on the iPad during the video), you can switch instantly between sources, effects, and combinations of the two with no interruption in the audio signal. Perform live, inspired in the moment, with infinite combinatorial possibilities.
  • In the Kyma 7 Timeline you can slow down or stop the progression of time to synchronize your performance with other performers, with key events, or with features extracted from an audio signal during your performance.
  • Using the Tool you can create a state machine where input conditions trigger the evaluation of blocks of code (for example, the game-of-life displayed on the LinnStrument during the closing credits of the video is being controlled by a Tool).
  • Kyma also provides a realtime parameter language called Capytalk where you can make parameters depend on one another or control subsets of parameters algorithmically.
  • It’s easy to add a new parameter control, simply type in the desired controller name preceded by an exclamation point — a control is automatically created for you, and it even generates its own widget in a Virtual Control Surface which can be remapped to external controllers (through MIDI, 14-bit MIDI, or OSC). This makes it easy to augment your live MPE controllers with other MIDI and OSC controllers or with tablet controller apps.

More information

Multidimensional Polyphonic Expression (MPE)
expressiveness.org

LinnStrument
rogerlinndesign.com

Kyma 7
symbolicsound.com

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.

Kyma Workshop in Brazil

Berkley-California-based composer/performer, Silvia Matheus, will be presenting a Kyma 7 seminar in Portuguese on October 8th 2015 at 1 pm in room 324 of FASM (Faculdade Santa Marcelina Convida) in São Paolo, Brazil.

Matheus describes Kyma as more than a language, but a complete production system for unique sound design used in the most famous film and sound production studios. In this seminar, she will demonstrate Kyma and provide an overview of the Pacarana system and Kyma language, addressing the numerous possibilities for sound transformation derived from this innovative and complex system.

No prerequisites are required and all compositores, músicos, sonoplastas, pesquisadores, game designers e artistas de som are invited to attend.

Faculdade Santa Marcelina – FASM
R. Dr. Emílio Ribas
89 – Perdizes
São Paulo – SP, 05006-020, Brazil
+55 11 3824-5800