The Kyma Language for Sound Design, Version 4.5

So if you see a parameter field that asks for a duration (e.g. Period, HoldTime or Delay) and you
would like to specify the duration that corresponds to one cycle of some particular frequency, you can
enter the desired frequency and take the inverse of it.
Likewise, in a Frequency parameter, you can enter a duration and take its inverse in order to get a frequency
in hertz. For example, if you are using an Oscillator as a repeating envelope and prefer to specify
the duration of each pass through the envelope waveform, you can put the inverse of that duration in
seconds into the Frequency field of the Oscillator.
Avoiding Carpal Tunnel
Many of these expressions are available in a list of hot expressions. Choose Paste hot… from the Edit
menu or use Ctrl+H to paste one of these expressions into a parameter field, saving yourself some typing.
Fun
You now have the bits and pieces to do most of the arithmetic you will need for Kyma. Given this, you
can figure out everything else by puzzling through it, piecing together subexpressions that you have figured
out before, drawing a few little sketches and trying a few things out. (Everyone does it like that, so
there’s no reason to feel inhibited about drawing a sketch or trying out a few test values in order to experiment).
And the little secret your high school teachers may just have forgotten to tell you is that it is
kind of fun to puzzle this stuff out — especially when the result is sound (and not just numbers scratched
in pencil on a blue-ruled sheet of paper).
The Real-time Evaluator
The arithmetic and other operations that you perform on Sounds or Event Values (the red names preceded
by exclamation points) in parameter fields may look like a cross between ordinary arithmetic and
the Smalltalk programming language. In fact, these expressions are evaluated in real time by an eventdriven
evaluator that runs on the Capybara. In other words, the expressions involving Event Values or
Sounds that you write in Kyma parameter fields are not evaluated on the host PC or Macintosh. They are
evaluated in real time on the Capybara; this means that the timing is unaffected by the other tasks being
performed by your computer (such as running your sequencer, wave editor, and operating system).
For a list of all functions understood by the real-time evaluator, along with an explanation and example
of how to use each one, see Real-Time Expressions in Parameter Fields on page 211.
Making More Room in the Parameter Fields
Once you start doing arithmetic in the parameter fields, you can run out of room pretty quickly. To enlarge
a parameter field to the full screen size, use Ctrl+L (for large window). You can also use the mouse
to pull up the center line that separates the signal flow graph from the parameter fields in the Sound editor,
thus giving more room to the parameters:
46