From: mclaren
Subject: Kyma upgrade
--
From time to time, your humble e-mail
correspondent has bitched and whined about
the lack of syntesizers offering real-time
granular synthesis, flexible FM, AM, digital
additive synthesis, blah-blah, woof-woof,
awww, put a sock in it, mclaren.
The Kyma multiprocessor synthesis system
is a fairly expensive piece of hardware whose
capabilities have been systematically upgraded
over the years. This synthesizer (combination
of hardware and very sophisticated object-
oriented software running on a host computer)
*does* allow the user to do real-time granular
synthesis, totally flexible FM, AM and digital
*does* allow the user to do real-time granular
synthesis, totally flexible FM, AM and digital
additive synthesis.
Kyma is unique because it's software-controlled.
The instrument has MIDI IN and MIDI OUT ports
as well as A/D INs and D/A OUTs. The system is
capable of responding either to MIDI messages or
to acoustic sounds, and it can modify both of 'em
in astonishing ways in real time.
Several years ago, Kyma used 10 MHz Motorola
56001 DSP chips--you could add up to 8 boards
to increase the parallel processing power of the
system. In effect, this meant you could get more
sounds at once, or a single more complex sound
in real time.
Since then, Carla Scaletti and Kurt Hebel have
systematically upgraded the Kyma until it now
features 8 56001 DSP chips operating at 66 MHz.
This makes the system significantly more powerful
features 8 56001 DSP chips operating at 66 MHz.
This makes the system significantly more powerful
than the ridiculously overpriced $15,000 Ircam Signal
Processsing Workstation, or ISPW (most of us
always thought ISPW stood for "Insanely Sick
Plutocratic Wank-off.")
At less than a third of a price of the outdated
and obsolete ISPW, the Kyma system doesn't
require an exotic UNIX workstation to run the
system software--an up-to-date Mac (with
NuBus slot) or PC will do. Moreover, Carla
Scaletti is constantly updating the software
and adding new capabilities... The current
release of KYMA includes phase vocoder
resynthesis *in real time* (given a prior non-
real-time LEMUR analysis file as input),
cellular automata algorithmic composition,
real-time "morphing" between resynthesized
timbres, and much much more.
real-time "morphing" between resynthesized
timbres, and much much more.
Because the system is completely under
software control, tuning is totally flexible.
Any kind of microtonal scale can be defined
and played in real-time or as an event-list.
The system's expensive, but nothing else comes
close to Kyma's capabilties, especially for
the computer-music microtonalist.
--mclaren
