Another from McLaren

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At less than a third of a price of the outdated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


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My thoughts on this subject, for what they are worth...

>Haverstick here...I want to make an observation inspired by McLaren's
>post regarding the studies undertaken to see what sort of tunings folks
>prefer....

Well, as someone who repairs and retunes harmonica for a variety of people
(from beginners to professionals), the overwhelming majority prefer JI. In
fact, there have been numerous times when someone has bought an brand-new
off-the-shelf harp of the equal-tuned variety and brought to me to "fix",
because it's "out of tune"! However, the same people then get very confused
when they play with a pianist and their 7/4 sounds way out, compared to the
piano's 1000c.

>...again, in a practical, nuts
>and bolts musical situation, eq temps are the only possible choice for
>many various styles of music...Hstick
>
>

I guess I feel I shouldn't agree with this, but can't help it. Much as I
prefer (and come to prefer more and more) the richness of my JI harps, in a
jamming situation, my first choice of instrument is a 12TET harp in the
appropriate key. Having said this, I wonder how often I (or anyone else with
an instrument capable of variable intonation) actually play in ET?
Typically, my blues playing features a lot of neutral thirds and slightly
flatted fifths.

My copy of "Sensations Of Tone" is out on loan at them moment, but I seem to
remember that Helmholtz found tendencies towards Pythagorean intonation
amomgst violinists - are there any other studies in this field?


Pat Missin - patm@globalnet.co.uk

"...my music's a lot better than it sounds!" (with apologies to Mark Twain)
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Neil H. points out:
> I mean, this all gets back to why 12/eq came about in the
> first place...purely tuned scales are, for all practical purposes, very
> limited in their applications...as soon as you want to move a lot of chords
> around, it's all over for just intonation.

Important caveat: That is true only with a fixed set of tones per octave. I
Just (harhar) wanted to make sure that everybody bears that in the backs of
their minds.

A lot of the reason why Wendy Carlos gets impressive results with extended JI
is that she has a well-defined means of making an indefinite (not to be confused
with "infinite") number of tones per octave. Or to put it another way, she
escapes the modal limitations Neil mentioned.


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