Say Hello to Kyma

The Kyma timeline environment. Not mine!
The Kyma timeline environment.

In balancing out such a crazy term, a few things were going to have to suffer. I present to you:

Sound Designing 2

Kyma Project – Scanner Duel

Part A
Using a microphone, record a vocal temp into protools to sketch out the sound design for the given quicktime (Scanners duel scene). Use as many tracks as is necessary and any plugin effects or audiosuite transformations that will make your design fit the scene.
Part B
Using any of the processes available in Kyma and any appropriate sound sources, create a sound design for the same scene, using the vocal temp that you created in part A as a template or blueprint.

Kyma Kyma Kyma. Such a wonderful and alluring word! I knew next to nothing about what this thing was or what it did, just that it was a device we had somewhere, buried in one of our back rooms, and that with the right level of arcane mastery, it could be used to create these incredibly techy, otherworldly textures and sounds that you couldn’t get anywhere else. I knew we’d spent almost no real class time on it, and that however much each student chose to master the Kyma in the time given to him was solely on him. I was ready.

What is a “Kyma?”

This should start things off:

Kyma is a visual programming language for sound design used by musicians, researchers, and sound designers. In Kyma, a user programs a multiprocessor DSP by graphically connecting modules on the screen of a Macintosh or Windows computer.
Wikipedia, “Kyma (sound design language)”

Essentially, the Kyma is a very expensive, very powerful and — in my limited experience — very niche sound design tool. It is two parts:

  1. a sort of programming environment where one can set up large processing chains with which to mutilate your choice of source sounds, from loaded-in samples to stuff you synthesize yourself
  2. and the external Paca Rana box that crunches all the 1s and 0s that execute that processing chain. The box is essentially a tiny computer whose every cycle is devoted to rendering sound and nothing else.

All of the components within the Paca itself are of really high quality, and that dedicated processing power means that no matter how much you want to stretch out, granulate and murder that sound, it’s still rendered very smoothly and naturally – and without messing with everything else your system has to do on its own, like run Pro Tools and whatever other plug-ins you have set up. It seems like it’d play very well in even crowded sessions.

Not as cute as the real thing.
Not as cute as the real thing.

The Kyma environment as a programming language is custom-designed for sound and sound alone, and genius founder Carla Scaletti has been at it for decades. It teases you in with seemingly infinite possibilities, a playful, hippie-ish sort of branding message and some very cool credits to its name.

If you’ve seen WALL-E, you’ve heard Ben Burtt’s work on the Kyma in the title robot’s adorably lilting voice. Video below, jump to a little past the 6min mark to see some of what the system’s capable of in terms of voice construction.

That box, unfortunately, will also run you upwards of $3000 or $4000. And while getting started in that programming environment and making some very out-there sounds with it is pretty quick, it’s not something you can jump into and use to go from a pre-planned Point A to Point B. Especially not in the one day timeframe I had left myself for this last assignment of the term.

Start to Finish in a Day

Fuck.
Fuck.

As I said, I was ready to kill this one. I’d heard what this box could do in the work of our badass late-term student, Javier, and I was ready to bend this thing to my will. But the film collaboration happened, the soundscape happened, the days rolled by without me learning much more than how to get the Kyma up and running.

Finally, I found myself at the end of the term, one day between myself and the deadline, and without a plan. Always a great place to be; I love working under pressure!

If you’ve been reading me, you know I can’t work without a little planning. Here’s what went through my head before I dove in on this one:

I made the decision to phone in the vocal temp. Yep, it was part of the overall assignment and grade, but I had missed the day’s class we had been given to record and clean it up (ironically, because I had been up late learning the Kyma the night before and slept in). With 24 hours to go, it didn’t make sense to spend the little time I had left polishing up the blueprint instead of the final actual piece. For better or worse, this needed to spring straight from my head to canvas in one go. Because of this, you’re not hearing my vocal temp. At least without buying me a drink.

I watched the scene. Many, many times. Sounds obvious, but if you don’t digest the hell out of the clip, even when you’re in a rush, you’re going to miss the visual cues and anchors you need to hit to create a really impactful sound design. This scene needed a lot of review here because of its extreme length and really slow pacing; there are no bullets fired, no punches or broken panes of glass or anything like that. A lot of it is just two dudes staring intensely at one another. I needed to find the moments where the stare intensified and hit them hard.

After watching and rewatching, and staying deliberately in the dark about the overall arc of the real movie, I decided:

  • This battle needed to feel dangerous, the wounds terrifying. I’d never seen Scanners, didn’t know what led up to the point of these two guys clashing, but any time you’re facing down a foe so strong that he can get into your head and make you tear your own face off, the audience should fucking fear a guy like that.
  • The psychic battle component should be synth-heavy, push myself a bit into the realm of synthetic sound design, which I (still) know almost nothing about. All my experimenting was getting done on this front, and I was counting on the Kyma to give me some great, unique source material to work with that sounded like nothing I’d ever heard but still resembled an epic battle of the minds.
  • Each character’s powers needed to have a distinct voice, so that you instinctively felt when the battle was turning one way or another. Of course, the bad guy’s should sound more powerful, a little darker, a little more focused; the good guy’s more benevolent, but full enough to take him down.

I’d leave the recorder running and just hope I got something randomly brilliant out of the Kyma. Sad times, but I didn’t have the luxury of setting up an elaborate custom processing chain to get myself exactly the sound I needed with so little time left. I ran what I thought was some cool source material (ice cracks, resonant metals) through some intro-level Kyma patches until I stumbled upon something workable, bounced it, then edited from there. The Kyma’s contribution ended up being mostly in the form of its really nice granulation functions, which I used (and cranked up) on a slowed down oxygen mask sample that I kept running throughout the scene as a bed for the whole encounter. You’ll also hear some of these effects on the wounds the bad guy sustains early on. Though I can’t remember why.

In the end, though, nearly all the sounds for this scene came from the Massive synth and a few tweaked presets. I found a few representative synths (bad guy powers, good guy powers, general sub bass, general “scanner duel” atmosphere) and ran through the scene a few times and made multiple passes, scoring the individual layers “live” with my fingers on a bunch of parameter knobs. Recorded it to MIDI, bounced it out to audio, left it to edit the next morning. This got me a lot of good stuff that was already pretty in sync with the pace of the scene, which made editing it pretty easily.

Final Result

That’s about all there is to say on this one – editing took it the rest of the way. Some of the plug-ins used here were WaveArts’ Panorama for stereo movement, ring modulation, the excellent Waves Doubler and MaxxBass plug-ins, along with a suite of reverbs, eqs and delays. If you have any specific questions, leave them in the comments and I’d be happy to answer!

What Went Right / What I Learned

  • Voice distinction. I feel like I nailed down a sort of personality for each character based on the sound of their psychic attacks; that evil boy sounds evil, and the good guy sounds a little purer.
  • Pain! Was pleased with some of the burning/searing accents on the bad guy’s points of focus. This was done mostly with some drastic volume automation on the sizzles combined with pitch shifts/etc. on the sound of his powers right when his expression changed.

What Went Wrong

  • Frequency content. Working with synth presets can be tricky, because they bring a ton of broadband noise/sound with them and sometimes fill up a lot more of the sound spectrum than you want. I didn’t have a lot of time to mix this assignment before submission, which means that there are some points where that synth noise really, really builds up and gets harsh. Maybe that serves the scene, but I think it’d need to be tamed a bit before this could go into the mix with BGs, dialogue, sound effects, etc. It’s a bit of a spectrum hog right now.
  • Not enough time to really use the Kyma. That device is capable of much, much more than I give it credit for in this assignment, and with a little more time I would have liked to make it do what I wanted, instead of just hitching a ride on the stuff it accidentally did.
  • Injury Foley. I had the brilliant idea to use a pan full of semi-congealed oatmeal and rake my hand across it to simulate the sounds of good guy pulling his face off – but this came a week after I’d finished the project. That sound could have used some love.
  • Flat Fire. With a little more time, I would’ve stylized the fire sounds a bit more – they were left pretty dry as is, and could have fit better with the texture of the rest of the mix.

The Sound Design community online seems to agree that the Kyma is a very powerful tool — maybe the best — for very specific tasks like granulation and cool vocal morphing, but that if you don’t have a lifetime to spend mastering it, there are quicker ways to get to the sound you want. I also don’t really see anything that it can do that Max/MSP couldn’t do better, and for thousands of dollars less, if you’re willing to sink time into mastering a sound design-oriented programming language one way or the other.

That all said, looking forward to spending some quality time with the Paca as the year rolls on, and maybe, finally getting it to do what I plan it to (and not simply something cool but unexpected) by the end of the year. I may never see one again, right?

Please leave any questions/thoughts/criticism in the comments!

2 Comments

James S May 12, 2011 Reply

Very cool, I love the way the scream was treated at the end of the clip. Was that through Kyma processing? Glad to have found this blog overall, I’m currently studying Sound Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design and it’s interesting to be able to read about other students’ experiences at other schools. We don’t use Kyma here, but we do get into Max/MSP a fair bit.

Luca May 13, 2011 Reply

Hey James,

Thanks for the feedback! The scream at the end was just me with a delay, and maybe a bit of bit-crushing. We go over MaxMSP a bit here, though really just up to the point where we’ve learned how to connect everything – custom modules/etc. are kinda left to us from there. Same with the Kyma.. in the end, they’re just tools, right?

But I definitely want to put the thing to use heavily on my final project before I’m out in the world and without a Pacarana.

Heard really good things about you guys at SCAD! Do you have some of your stuff online?

Luca

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