The Kyma Language for Sound Design, Version 4.5

Now select and play the FormantBankOscillator. Each time you press a key on the MIDI keyboard, it
will trigger the envelope, and you will hear the frequency vary according to the shape you drew in the
GraphicalEnvelope.
To make the deviation more extreme, multiply the effect of the GraphicalEnvelope by 12 nn. This gives
you a frequency deviation of one octave (12 half steps):
I just want to sing
GraphicalEnvelope1 L * 12 nn + 2 c
Some of the Sounds in Kyma extract parameters from their inputs, for example, the AmplitudeFollower
or the FrequencyTracker extract the amplitude and frequency, respectively. If you apply one of these
modules to the ADInput, you can use your own voice (or an instrument) to control parameter values of
Kyma Sounds.
Drag an AmplitudeFollower from the Analysis category of the prototypes, and drop it on top of the
GraphicalEnvelope.
Select and play the FormantBankOscillator and then sing into the microphone. The louder you sing (or
yell) into the microphone, the more pitch deviation in the FormantBankOscillator. This is one form of
“cross synthesis”, controlling the parameter of one Sound with a different parameter extracted from another
Sound.
Treating MIDI Events as Audio Signals
By pasting Sounds into parameter fields, you can, in a slightly twisted way, treat MIDI events as if they
were audio signals or create shared expressions. The trick is to use the Constant Sound.
The Constant is used to indicate a value that remains constant instead of varying over time the way most
signals do. Paradoxically enough, you can put Event Values into the Constant’s Value field so that the
value changes in response to events coming in from MIDI or other sources—in other words, it becomes a
“time-varying constant”.
Suppose that you wanted to treat the MIDI pitch as a signal, subjecting it to signal processing operations
like delay, attenuation, or filtering before using it to control the pitch of an oscillator. To turn MIDI pitch
into a signal, enter
!KeyNumber / 127
into the Value field of a Constant. Why divide by 127? Because a Constant’s value must be between -1
and 1, and a key number is between 0 and 127.
Now you can feed the Constant into a DelayWithFeedback, a HarmonicResonator, a PeakDetector, or
some other chain of processing Sounds, and then paste the chain into the Frequency field of the Oscilla-
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