Public Art Biennial in Abu Dhabi

Kyma artist Hasan Hujairi was invited to join an event at Christopher Joshua Benton’s installation for the inaugural Public Art Biennial in Abu Dhabi: Where Lies My Carpet Is Thy Home (2024). Participating artists included Safeya Alblooshi, Hasan Hujairi, Manic Mundane, and Espervene.

Installed on land gifted to the carpet sellers of Abu Dhabi by city founder, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, Benton’s gigantic astroturf kilim is so large that it is best viewed from the air. It doubles as a public park and is surrounded by the carpet sellers’ shops and upstairs residences.

Photo from Architectural Digest article, courtesy of Abu Dhabi Culture and Tourism

Sound Unbound by Halo Halo Experiment on 11 January 2025 was described as four, 30-minute sonic explorations that transcend the boundaries of sound and redefine the concept of “home” at Christopher Joshua Benton’s installation.

Hasan Hajairi’s setup for ‘Sound Unbound’ at Christopher Joshua Benton’s public art installation in Abu Dhabi: Where Lies My Carpet Is Thy Home (2024)

Hujairi writes,

“I wanted to challenge myself by making this the first time I performed live with Kyma. I created a very simple Kyma Multigrid, and since I love the possibilities of the TimeIndex, I had one sound object cycling through a folder of about 150 short sound samples from analog electronic equipment controlled from the Wacom tablet. I loved how sometimes it would sound like granular synthesis, sometimes it would sound like short loops. I could change the playback rate, giving many options to play with sound on the fly and make decisions while performing. I was assigned 30 minutes to perform and by using the Multigrid, I was able to perform at different tempos and with different tools.”

To begin the performance, Hajairi used the macOS text-to-speech function to invite the audience to come closer and to listen closely.

Study Kyma in Germany

Franz Danksagmüller is offering a Kyma workshop next semester at the Musikhochschule Lübeck as part of a new Master’s Program in Organ Improvisation: Creativity, Innovation, and Interdisciplinarity – a course of study offering creative, cutting-edge musicians an opportunity to develop their artistic personalities through innovative improvisation, composition, electronic instrument and controller design, creative AI for improvisation and composition, generative video and sound design, and Kyma for live electronic performances.

Recently featured on NDR news, the groundbreaking program brings the art of organ improvisation into the 21st century and introduces the organ to artists from other disciplines. The focus is on current styles and techniques and on combining the organ with contemporary trends and modern media. Students develop individual forms of expression and acquire the skills necessary to realize innovative musical and live digital media projects and collaborations.

Closely aligned with the “Sound Arts and Creative Music Technology” degree program, the new degree includes courses in:

  • Development and Control of Electronic Instruments and Controllers
  • Creative Use of AI for Improvisation and Composition
  • Video software and tools for live multimedia performance
  • Kyma electronics for live performances
Access to Unique Instruments

Through a collaboration with St. Nikolai church in Hamburg, students gain access to an innovative hyper-organ, where they can learn microphone placement for processing the organ sound, handle MIDI connections and electronic platforms, and use the organ as an interface for interactive and multimedia projects. The program also maintains close partnerships with the Orgelpark in Amsterdam — renowned for its pioneering work in merging tradition and modern technology — and the experimental organ at St. Martin’s Church in Kassel —known for its quarter-tone manual, wind regulation options, and overtone registers, offering additional ways to explore contemporary improvisation techniques and soundscapes.

Collaboration and Networking

Thanks to close collaborations with universities and institutions in Lübeck and Hamburg, as well as partnerships with international festivals, students benefit from extensive practical experience and networking opportunities. Collaboration with students from other disciplines is particularly encouraged at MHL.

Numerous partnerships with various festivals (including the Nordic Film Days Lübeck, the largest film festival in Northern Europe) and major churches in Northern Germany provide students with the opportunity to present their work to a broader audience.

The Master’s Program in Organ Improvisation: Creativity, Innovation, and Interdisciplinarity at Musikhochschule Lübeck combines tradition with innovation and opens doors to a new direction in musical creation, positioning the organ as a central interface for artistic expression.

For more details and to find out how to apply, visit:
https://www.mh-luebeck.de/de/studium/studiengaenge/master-of-music-orgel-improvisation/

 

Airplay for the McLean Mix

Curated by the French electronic music organization Modulisme, the music of Bart and Priscilla McLean, including their recent Kyma work, has been getting airplay on a number of international radio programs dedicated to electronic music, including:

Modulisme host and musician Philippe Petit has been a music journalist and radio DJ since 1983.

Discord FOMO

If you haven’t visited the Kyma Discord Community recently, you may want to take a look (select Discord from the Help menu in Kyma). Here are just a few of the announcements you may have missed:

• Rick Stevenson posted examples from his new RdSP — a polyphonic sample player he created that uses his Rungler to select and schedule from a pool of samples — available for download from the Kyma Community Library. Here’s one of the excerpts Rick posted as an example:

 
• Anne La Berge announced the release of the new album that she recorded with Tom Hamilton in January 2020 with overdubs by Suzana Lașcu in 2024.

• Lots of questions and answers in the new-to-kyma forum (reminders & refreshers for experienced Kyma users as well as quick answers for those who are just getting started on their Kyma explorations). If you run into a question, just select Discord from the Help menu to get an answer from the community of sound designers and developers.

• Rio Roye posted a clip of himself playing Ben Phenix’s cloud index divisor tool with 12 cloud indexes dividing the same high frequency pulse train.

• There was a discussion of how to create sequencers (and a reference to Bart McLean’s tutorials in Insights magazine

• Samuel Sacher invited everyone to share the titles of their favorite books on sound (in the palaver forum).

And much more! If you ever have a question or just feel like chatting with a fellow Kyma sound designer, the (international) Kyma Community is always just one menu selection away. (Alternatively you can install the Discord app on your mobile device and set up alerts so you always know what’s happening).

See you there!

Sound design drives the narrative

Phaze UK sound designers — Rob Prynne, Matt Collinge & Alyn Sclosa along with Kyma consultant Alan M. Jackson — have been getting some well-deserved attention recently for their work on Ridley Scott’s film Gladiator II, work that has been shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination and a BAFTA.

In the 6 January 2025 ToneBenders sound design podcast, Timothy Muirhead and the sound team delve into the details of how sound design guides audience sentiment during each of the gladiatorial contests — with the “crowd sound” taking on a role typically served by the musical score.

Director Scott’s challenge to the sound team was that the crowd itself should function as a major character in the film — telling the story of the rise and fall of each of the other characters — and symbolizing the fall of Rome as the populace loses faith in the emperors.

“So much detail and effort went into making the crowd reactions in the Roman Colosseum…narrate the emotions of the battles”

During the podcast, the sound team — Paul Massey (Dialog/Music Re-Recording Mixer), Danny Sheehan (Supervising Sound Editor), Matt Collinge (Supervising Sound Editor & SFX/Foley Re-Recording Mixer) and Stéphane Bucher (Production Sound Mixer) recount their unusual approach of including the post-production team in the production phase so they could coordinate their efforts. This gave the post-production sound designers an opportunity to “direct” the crowd extras and to ensure that they could capture the raw material needed for post production crowd-enlargement.

In an IBC behind-the-scenes article, supervising sound editors Matthew Collinge and Danny Sheehan (co-founders of Phaze UK) describe how they generated the sound of 10,000 spectators by layering the sound of extras on the set with recordings of cheers and jeers from bullfights, cricket matches, rugby and baseball games and then “…transformed them into a cohesive roar using a Kyma workstation,” according to Sheehan.

During an interview with A Sound Effect, Matthew Collinge describes the sound design for the gladiatorial contests involving animals: “We manipulated actual animal sounds to highlight their aggression and power. For the baboons, we morphed chimp calls and then combined them with the screeches of other animals to create a unique and very intimidating sound.”

In that same interview, Collinge describes how Rob Prynne and the team enhanced the sounds of the arrow trajectories:

Rob Prynne used these recordings to model a patch in the Kyma where we took the amplitude variation between the L and the R in the recordings and used this to create an algorithm that we could apply to other samples. We then mixed in animal and human screams and screeches which had their pitch mapped to this algorithm and made it feel as one with the original recordings.

GLADIATOR II: Behind The Glorious Sound – with Matthew Collinge & Danny Sheehan

When you see Gladiator II — whether in a theatre or via your favorite streaming service — you’ll be rewarded with a bit of extra information if you stick with it through the closing credits!

Sound design & Kyma Consultancy credits. Photo submitted by an anonymous movie-goer who patiently sat through the end credits.

Umano Post Umano

On 19 December 2024, composer Agostino Di Scipio utilized live Kyma signal processing in his ambitious intermedia work premiered at the Nuova Consonanza festival.

Umano Post Umano is, in some sense, a review of Di Scipio’s artistic work, exposing the full range of performance practices he has explored over the last 25 years (since he first introduced Audible Ecosystemics). Umano Post Umano features music, electroacoustic environments and digital audio processing by Agostino Di Scipio, video projections and stage design by Matias Guerra, texts collected from job advertisements, legal and financial advertising and from Hesiod’s Theogony, as well as multiple performers on acoustic instruments, each of whom also operates a live camera.
Continue reading “Umano Post Umano”

Kyma and the space of computable sound @ ADC24

“…each instrument, each tool… implies an imaginable and explorable universe” — Jacques Attali

To Symbolic Sound co-founder, Carla Scaletti, every tool — from a user interface to a programming language, to an LLM — is a “map” to some underlying functionality. How do the design choices we make affect what people can imagine creating with those maps? How can we begin to navigate an abstract, completely unknown (and potentially infinite) space — like the space of all computable sound? How (and why) is the Kyma Sound graph radically different from other “visual” programming languages for sound and music?

Find out by watching her keynote address, presented at the 2024 Audio Developer Conference (ADC 24).

Violins abducted by aliens

They come in peace!

Anssi Laiho’s Teknofobia Ensemble is a live-electronics piece that combines installation and concert forms: an installation, because its sound is generated by machines; a concert piece, because it has a time-dependent structure and musical directions for performers. The premiere was 13 November 2024 at Valvesali in Oulu, Finland.

Laiho views technophobia, the fear of new technological advancements, as a subcategory of xenophobia, the fear of the unknown or of outsiders. His goal was to present both of these phobias in an absurd setting.

The composer writes that “the basic concept of technophobia — that ‘machines will replace us and make us irrelevant’— is particularly relevant today, as programs using artificial intelligence are becoming mainstream and are widely used across many industries.”

Teknofobia Ensemble poses the question: What if there were a planet inhabited by a mechanical species, and these machines came to Earth and tried to communicate with us via music? What would the music sound like, and would they first try to learn and imitate our culture in order to communicate with us?

Laiho’s aim was to reproduce the live-electronics environment he would normally work in, but to replace the human musicians with robots — not androids or simulants but “mechanical musicians”.

He asked himself, “What would it mean for my music and creative process if this basic assumption were to become true? As a composer living in the 2020s, do I still need musicians to perform my compositions? Wouldn’t it be easier to work with machines that always fulfill my requests? Can a mechanical musician interpret a musical piece on an emotional level, as a human being does, or does it simply apply virtuosity to the technical execution of the task?”

He then set out to prove himself wrong!

Teknofobia Ensemble consists of five prepared violins, each equipped with a Raspberry Pi that controls various types of electronic motors (solenoids, DC motors, stepper motors, and servos) through a Python program. This program converts OSC commands received from Kyma into PWM signals on the Raspberry Pi pins, which are connected to motor drivers.

In live performances, Kyma acts as the conductor for the ensemble, while Laiho views his role as primarily that of a “mixer for the band”.

The piece is structured as a 26-minute-long Kyma timeline, consisting of OSC instructions (the musical notation of the piece) for the mechanical violins. The live sound produced by the violins is routed back to Kyma via custom-made contact microphones for live electronic processing.

Composer Oriol Graus Ribas Unveils his “Secrets”

With a multidisciplinary background spanning industrial engineering, flamenco and classical guitar, music composition, and electronic music, award-winning composer/guitarist Oriol Graus Ribas composes for a wide range of instruments, multimedia, electronically-transformed acoustic instruments, and electroacoustic multifocal diffusion arrays.

Between 2014 and 2022, Graus Ribas embarked on a period of creative exploration, recording several improvisations in which he intentionally limited himself to a restricted set of pitches. In 2024, he selected the best of those recordings for further development and compiled them into a new album: Secrets — a serene, reflective soundtrack for introspection and contemplation as the new year begins to reveal its secrets.

Material for Secrets comes from an electric guitar stripped of any sound processing. Gradually, the sound of the guitar becomes inaudible as it is routed through Kyma modifications, primarily the CrossFilter and SampleCloud. Graus Ribas employs a pedalboard to dynamically navigate the flow between the raw and Kyma-processed sounds.

Composer Oriol Graus Ribas
Oriol Graus Ribas (Photo by Alba Espot)

Reflecting on his creative process, Graus Ribas writes, “Working with Kyma-Pacamara allows me to dedicate my time entirely to the music itself!”

Toe and Shell (IRL)

Remember the lockdowns? Throughout those bleak days when musicians couldn’t perform in public, a small group of Kyma artists managed to find a way to continue meeting and making music together via Zoom in two virtual concerts they called Toe and Shell. In early November 2024 they decided to meet in person at Splendor, a former bathhouse that Anne La Berge has converted into a musical mecca in the center of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Setting up for a multi-system jam session

The first order of business was for the participants to collectively agree on a schedule of presentations, discussions, and public concerts. Then, over the course of the three day meetup, everyone had a chance to ask questions, experiment, share expertise, and improvise together.

Pete Johnston, Anne La Berge, Charlie Norton sharing expertise

As part of the Toe and Shell, Anne La Berge hosted three public concerts at Splendor.

Alan Jackson performing with Anne La Berge
Steve Ricks improvisation with trombone and Kyma

Alan Jackson conducting the collective schedule-making session