The Kyma Language for Sound Design, Version 4.5

criterion for selection, you can assign a likelihood that any given track will be selected on any given
frame. If you set the Probability to 1, then this last test will have no effect, because any tracks that
have satisfied the other criteria have a likelihood of one — in other words, a 100% chance of being selected.
If you set Probability to 0, then you won’t hear anything, because all tracks have zero chance
of being selected. In this case, we have set it to 1 - !Burbliness, so the larger the value of !Burbliness,
the less often a track will be selected when it is tested. This explains why the sound breaks up more
and more as you increase the value of !Burbliness.
Try changing the setting of Probability to
TrackNumber / 512
This weights the higher tracks more than the lower numbered tracks, giving a kind of probabilistic high
pass filter effect, since the higher tracks are selected so much more often than the lower ones. (!Burbliness
still shows up in the virtual control surface because it also has an affect on the AmpScale in the
LiveSpectralAnalysis. Don’t worry about it, because it doesn’t have too much of an effect other than to
change the overall amplitude slightly).
On occasion, though, a low bloop still gets through, because the lower tracks still have a nonzero likelihood
of occurring. To remedy that, try changing the Probability to
TrackNumber - 32 / 512
This makes the probability of the first 32 tracks negative (effectively zero), and weights the remaining
tracks according to track number.
Skipping Harmonics
The final example in this file is called split spectrum.
Notice that the LiveSpectralAnalysis feeding into the SpectrumModifier in this example has the Harmonic
box checked. That means that, in this case, track number is synonymous with harmonic number.
(This was not true for the previous examples which did not have Harmonic checked).
Take a look at the parameters of the SpectrumModifier in this example, in particular:
Parameter Setting
FreqScale !Frequency
Probability TrackNumber rem: 3
Seed -0.2
HearAll checked
The message rem: is short for “remainder,” so this is another way of saying the remainder left over after
dividing TrackNumber by three.
In other words, the probability of the first harmonic being on is 1, for the second 2 (but the maximum
probability is 1, so anything greater than 1 is just the same as 1), for the third harmonic 0 (because the remainder
is zero), and so on. In other words, the pattern is two harmonics on, next harmonic off, two
harmonics on, next harmonic off.
The selected harmonics are frequency scaled, so you can split apart the spectrum of the input as it is
playing, with some harmonics going down in frequency and others continuing as they were.
Uncharted Territory
It hasn’t been possible to do this sort of thing in real time until fairly recently, so anything you develop
with these Sounds has a high probability of being something that no one has heard before. So experiment
and have fun!
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