The Kyma Language for Sound Design, Version 4.5

A Sound, no matter how complex, can always serve as the input to another Sound. Think of Sounds as
something like highly abstracted audio Tinker Toys. Once you have constructed one hub and spoke
you can plug that construction into another hub, and that one, in turn, into yet another, ad infinitum:
At any point you could also fan out and connect several spokes
No matter how complex a sub-construction of Tinker Toys you have made, you can always plug it in at
the end of a spoke, just the same as if it were a single hub.
The same is true for Sounds. Anywhere you can use a sound source, you could also use a modifier of a
source or a combiner of a source; Sounds are uniform and interchangeable. Even a Sound that contains a
complex script that functions as a score or reads a standard MIDI file can be used as the input to another
chain of modifiers and combiners. This is one of the things that makes Kyma different from most other
music software: a “score” or an algorithm for generating events is part of the Sound object and is not necessarily
at the “top level” of the hierarchy; there can be several “scores” distributed throughout a complex
signal flow diagram. (And by the way, the entire signal flow diagram is itself a Sound).
We call all of these objects Sounds in order to emphasize the uniformity and interchangeability of Sound
objects. But having said all that, we can now relax a bit and sometimes use the word module to describe
Sounds.
Sound Parameters
All Sounds, whether they are sources, modifiers, or combiners, also have parameters or settings. These
have nothing to do with the signal flow, but are local adjustments made to that Sound alone and affecting
the way that Sound does its generating or processing or combining of other Sounds.
Sound parameters can be:
♦ Constants (for example, numbers, strings, or sample names)
♦ Functions of time (for example, ramp functions or triggers from a metronome)
♦ Hot controls (supplied externally from a MIDI controller or internally from Kyma)
♦ Sounds (for example, using an Oscillator to control the parameter of another Sound)
♦ Arithmetic expressions involving any combination of the above
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