source file: mills2.txt Date: Fri, 30 Aug 1996 16:02:49 -0700 Subject: Another from McLaren From: John Chalmers 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 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 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 At less than a third of a price of the outdated and obsolete ISPW, the Kyma system doesn't require an exotic UNIX workstation to run the system software--an up-to-date Mac (with NuBus slot) or PC will do.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. 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 Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sat, 31 Aug 1996 06:41 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA10513; Sat, 31 Aug 1996 06:43:02 +0200 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA10535 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id VAA21831; Fri, 30 Aug 1996 21:42:59 -0700 Date: Fri, 30 Aug 1996 21:42:59 -0700 Message-Id: <199608310442.WAA02277@freenet.uchsc.EDU> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu