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46
audio
construction kit
What’s small, furry, and makes
exotic noises? RICHARD WENTK
discovers that two out of
three isn’t bad.
THE REVIEWER
RICHARD WENTK is the owner
of Skydancer Media, a digital
production company providing
sound, image, design, and
consultancy services to various
clients in London and the West
Country.
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Sound’s Kyma has been the sound industry’s
secret weapon for nearly two decades, clocking up
credits on films like Wall-E, The Dark Knight and
��ymbolic
Finding Nemo, and collecting users like Ben Burtt and
producer/DJ BT. In 1990, Designers Kurt Hebel and Carla
Scaletti joined forces to create a sound processor that ran
on the – then – latest generation of DSP hardware.
The result was Capybara, a rack-mounted monster that
could be expanded with extra DSP cards. As Moore’s law
crept ever onwards, it became possible to pack more power
into a smaller box. Kyma Pacarana is the latest iteration of
this process. Like previous Kyma expanders, it’s named after
an unlikely and exotic rodent. But unlike most rodents, it’s
packed with DSP power, equivalent to 150% of a fully loaded
Capybara, at a much lower price. It’s also small enough to
be packed as airport carry-on.
So how does Kyma work in practice? Installation
is frankly eccentric, and consists of copying files by
hand from the CD to an installation directory and
also selecting drivers by hand.
Connection between Pacarana and
your host computer is via F800.
But both F800 and F400/800 cables
are in the box, so any F400 interface
can be used. Once installation
is completed, Pacarana boots.
One minor nitpick is that you have
to touch the panel, which makes
it difficult to park out of sight. The
processor box runs quite hot and
needs good ventilation. Noise when
idling isn’t too distracting, but the
fans become more obvious when
running at full tilt.
The older Capybara processor
included its own audio I/O, but Pacarana doesn’t.
Kyma can’t run inside a VST, RTAS, or AU wrapper, so it has
to be connected to a separate interface using its own USB
or FireWire ports. Effectively it becomes a separate piece
of digital outboard with AES/EBU or S/PDIF connections.
Analogue connections will work too, as a last resort.
Similarly, if you want to use a keyboard, it has to be
plugged in to the MIDI or USB ports at the back of
Pacarana – you can’t use a controller already connected
to your PC or Mac.
According to Symbolic Sound, AU support depends on
Apple, and will become possible with the next update of
OS X. VST and RTAS support are both longer term projects.
While this limitation isn’t a showstopper – many facilities
still use outboard – it bucks the trend of the most recent
wave of DSP products that are more tightly integrated
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AUDIO MEDIA MAY 2009
and better suited for working entirely inside the box.
It also means you’ll need to dedicate an extra interface
and/or controller exclusively for Kyma. Not all controllers
are supported, but the list is growing – you can find
details on the Symbolic Sound website. We had some
problems getting the external interface – a TC Konnekt
24D – recognised reliably. We did eventually evolve a
reliable boot sequence, but a more polished approach
would be useful here.
In The Box
The Kyma software, which is updated regularly, includes a
long, long list of pre-made modules and presets, an editor
for what are called ‘sounds’ – patches – and a multi-track
timeline editor which triggers sounds at certain hit-points
for synchronised playback, effectively reconfiguring
Kyma in real time. Sounds are built from modules linked
using virtual patchcords, and you can and should build
and save your own. The patching process is slightly
quirky but it doesn’t take long to
master it. The manual, which you
will need to read, is excellent –
it’s more of a book than a quick
summary of features, and it’s
written in a comprehensive, jaunty,
and accessible style that puts most
manuals to shame.
If you’ve used a patchable
system like Reaktor or Max/MSP,
you may be wondering what makes
Kyma special – aside from hardware
acceleration, which offloads all of
the processing onto Pacarana and
frees up your processor for more
usual processing. There are three
obvious differences. The first is that Kyma includes a
much wider range of powerful modules and techniques.
All of the usual synthesis, processing, and modulation
basics are included, including filters, vocoders, oscillators,
reverbs, compressors, and limiters, both single channel
and multi-band, various kinds of EQ, granulation, and
plain old sampling. There are also various spectral
display and waveform display windows – and Kyma
adds spectral processing, morphing, and resynthesis.
In fact, resynthesis and morphing are almost comically easy.
You can analyse almost any pair of files and morph
between them manually or automatically, with
excellent results.
The second difference is that almost anything can be
connected to almost anything else, and to a large extent
modules can be peeled open to reveal their component
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