The Kyma Language for Sound Design, Version 4.5

Sound Effects
Musical Phrases
between the amplitude envelopes of the female and male voices. The left channel (the amplitude) is controlled
by
2 * !Morph - 1
while the right channel (the frequency) is controlled by
2 * !Morph
Because the values are limited to the range of 0 to 1, these functions clip at their low and high extremes.
In other words, 2 * !Morph will reach its maximum value of 1 when !Morph is 0.5 and will stay at its
maximum value of 1 for all larger values of !Morph. On the other hand, 2 * !Morph - 1, will remain 0
for !Morph values of 0 through 0.5, and will then climb from 0 up to 1 as !Morph increases from 0.5
up to 1.
The result sounds like a woman growing larger in size because of the lower fundamental frequency and
the shift to lower formant regions or resonances. At the last moment, it seems to “come into focus” as the
normal formant regions of the male voice take over.
Amplitude and Frequency Together
The next example, linear morph, controls both amplitudes and frequencies with a single morph parameter.
This gives a different impression than the last example; it sounds more continuous (although this
approach is the most sensitive to artifacts in the analysis).
I’d like to buy a vowel
In listening to the previous examples, you probably noticed that most of the artifacts occur during the
consonants, so another approach might be to morph only during vowels. morph on vowel uses WarpedTimeIndex
to stretch time during the [u] vowel in “you”, giving you enough time to complete the
morph during a vowel. This was done by adding
!Stretch s
or !Stretch number of seconds to each of the IdealTimePoints following the time point at which the
vowel occurs. (You can determine the time at which the vowel starts by locating it in the graphical spectrum
editor).
The next example, harley to lion, ‡ uses a GraphicEnvelope to control the shape of the morph; double-click
on the Sound called env to see the function. This is a handy way to design your morph functions in an
interactive, yet repeatable way.
Try playing cat baby and then double-click on it to take a look at how it was constructed. This is a Concatenation
of a resynthesized cat (to establish an unmodified, familiar sound in the listener’s mind first),
a cat-to-baby morph, a baby-to-cat morph, and finally another resynthesis of the cat. The singing werewolf
example is similar. §
didgeri-mouth uses an Oscillator to control a morph back and forth between a didgeridoo and a mouth
harp using the Gaussian wavetable as the shape of the morph.
In drum to tubular, a TimeOffset is used to delay the ramp function that controls the amplitude morph,
so the pitch is completely morphed before the beginning of the amplitude morph.
‡ Special thanks to Frank Serafine for permission to include these analyses of sound effects samples from his CD,
Platinum Sounds for the 21st Century from L2 Sound FX. For more information on this sound library, call +1-800-
779-L2FX.
§ Special thanks to Scott Whitney at Hollywood Edge for permission to include the analyses we did of the cat, the
baby, and the dog, which are derived from samples in their CD-ROM sound library Hollywood Edge: The Edge
Edition. For more information on these sound libraries, visit their website at http://www.hollywoodedge.com.
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