The Kyma Language for Sound Design, Version 4.5

2. Select the first sample by clicking the Select button and using the file dialog to locate the sample
Cmorph from the speech folder of the Samples folder of the Wavetables folder. Kyma will start
playing the sample over and over with a 1 second silence between repetitions. To change the duration
of the silence between repetitions of the sample to two seconds, type in a 2 in place of the 1, and
press Enter.
Listen to the sample and estimate the pitch range of the speech. Then click Next to continue.
3. Choose the highest analysis frequency that is still lower than the lowest frequency you hear in the
sample. In this example, the voice seems to go as low as 3 d or 3 c, so try 2 F as the setting.
The analysis is done by a bank of band-pass filters equally spaced in frequency from 0 hz up to half of
the sampling rate; the lower the frequency you choose here, the more filters there will be, and the
closer those filters will be spaced in frequency. For 1 F, it uses 512 filters, for 2 F it uses 256 filters and
so on (divide the number of filters in half each time you go up an octave in the analysis frequency).
Press the Audition button to hear a real-time analysis and resynthesis with the analysis parameters as
you have them currently set. Just below the Audition button, Kyma will print out the number of sine
wave oscillators being used to resynthesize the sound from the real-time analysis. This number will
vary depending on the analysis frequency you have chosen and the number of expansion cards in
your Capybara.
Try out a different analysis frequency by choosing 5 F and then clicking the Audition button again.
Clearly this setting does not give you enough filters to adequately cover what is going on in the signal,
so change it back to 2 F.
4. In the last step, you effectively chose the number of bandpass filters to be used in the analysis. This
next step controls the bandwidth of those filters. In the everpresent tradeoff between time and frequency,
you can choose BestFreq and get the narrowest bandwidths (and the most time smearing), or
you can choose BestTime to get the best time response (but the widest bandwidth and thus the worst
frequency resolution), or you can choose any of the intermediate settings to get intermediate bandwidths
and intermediate results with respect to time smearing and frequency resolution.
Leaving the frequency set at 2 F, try out each of BestFreq, BestTime, BetterFreq, and BetterTime,
clicking the Audition button after each choice to hear the differences. Generally speaking, you can
tell when the bandwidth is too narrow if the result sounds like it has reverb or a delay on it, and you
can tell when the bandwidth is too wide by a kind of roughness or distorted sound in the resynthesis.
When you find the best sounding analysis (or the least-strange-sounding analysis if you are feeling
negative today), click Next to continue.
5. You are ready to try the first analysis! Click the button labeled Create Spectrum File. The name of the
analysis file will be the name of the original sample followed by an s (for spectrum) and the number
of analysis filters used (or, to put it another way, the number of analysis “tracks” that can be read by
an OscillatorBank and resynthesized).
Create your own wavetables folder called MyWavetables. In it, create a folder Spectra, and within
Spectra create a folder called speech. Save the analysis file in this speech folder. The analysis tool
automatically creates a SumOfSines Sound and places it into an untitled Sound file window for you.
Just for fun, double-click on this Sound, change the Duration to On, and multiply the OnDuration
by 10 to time-stretch the resynthesis.
A straight spectrum is best for time-stretching or frequency-scaling, or when the two files you are
morphing have no definite pitch to them. However, if the original samples have identifiable pitches
in them, the morph will probably work better if you proceed to the next step: the quasi-harmonic
analysis.
If your original sample has an identifiable pitch to it, you should continue with the analysis by clicking
on Set Quasi-Harmonic Parameters. Since CMorph (and indeed human speech in general) does
have an identifiable pitch, click on that button now to continue.
6. In this next section of the analysis, Kyma asks you to help identify the fundamental frequency of the
original sample. The first step is to identify parts of the sound that do not have any identifiable pitch
to them.
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