The Kyma Language for Sound Design, Version 4.5

Attic
The very top of the sample editor is an overview of the entire file. Drag the mouse across this overview to
draw a gray box around any subpart of the file. The region enclosed in the gray box is what you see in the
larger waveform display below the line of buttons.
Upstairs
The large waveform view is where you can select, copy, cut, paste, and trim sample files. It shows the familiar
representation of a signal as amplitude versus time. To select the entire file, use Select all from the
Edit menu (Ctrl+A). Select a sub-section by dragging the mouse across the desired portion of the waveform
(selections are shown within large red brackets). If you simply click on one point in time within the
waveform, it will mark an insertion point, rather than sweeping out a selection. An insertion point is indicated
by a single, vertical red line that blinks like the insertion cursor in a text editor.
Each of the buttons refers to the current, red-bracketed selection or insertion point.
The left and right arrows will jump the display left or right by the size of the selection. The play button
plays the selection. The disk button will replace the selection with the contents of a sample file that you
select using a file dialog (or, if you have an insertion point rather than a selection, it will insert the entire
contents of the other file at that point in this file). The magnifying glass button causes the current selection
to fill the window in both the horizontal and vertical direction. All of the buttons with little
waveforms and arrows on them either stretch or compress the waveform in the direction of the black arrows.
And the ellipsis or et cetera button (…) handles some miscellaneous functions. One of the
miscellaneous options is to inspect and/or edit the header information in the sample file. The other is a
button rather cryptically labeled as Display Lissajous which will display the waveform in horizontal direction
versus the same waveform delayed by a specified number of samples in the vertical direction.
Downstairs
Spectrum Editor
The lowest portion of the sample editor contains templates for generating waveforms or functions. Select a
template from the pop up list on the left. When you click the Insert button, the selected algorithm will
generate a waveform based upon the parameters that you have entered in the template, and if you have a
selection in the waveform view it will replace that selection with the newly generated waveform.
The Fourier template, for example, has fields for the duration of the waveform, for the number of the
harmonics that you would like to add together to create the waveform, for the relative amplitudes and
phases of each of the harmonics, and for an overall gain on the entire waveform. To try it, first make sure
the entire waveform is selected in the waveform window by clicking in the waveform area and performing
Select all (Ctrl+A), and then click the Insert button.
And in the Basement…
By now some of you are probably wondering how to write your own programs to generate arbitrary tables
and store them as Kyma wavetables that can be indexed using the Waveshaper module. The answer
lies deep at the bottom of the list of the templates where it says Programs. Here you can find a Smalltalk
program corresponding to each of the template waveform generators. Find the program closest to the one
you would like to write, and alter it to do exactly what it is that you need. (If you have never programmed
in Smalltalk before, you should first read The Smalltalk-80 Language on page 513.)
One way to display a sound visually is as amplitude versus time as in the sample editor. Another is to
display it as frequency and amplitude versus time as in the spectrum editor.
Creating and Opening a Spectrum File
Before you can display a Sound in the frequency domain, you must first create an analysis of the timedomain
waveform. The result of this analysis is a spectrum file which you can open and edit in the spec-
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