The Kyma Language for Sound Design, Version 4.5

select a region that includes several tracks, use the mouse to draw a box around the region. You can extend
boxed selections in the same way that you extend single track selections, by holding the Shift key
down when you make the new selection. You can also make selections based on a number of amplitude
or frequency criteria.
Playing and Scrubbing
Anytime you make a selection, the selected tracks or portions of tracks are immediately played so you
can hear what you just selected. There are also buttons to play the entire spectrum file, the part of the file
that is selected, and the part of the file between the start and end markers.
To hear different sections of the file, use the mouse to drag the vertical yellow scrub bar over the regions
you would like to hear. You can also use MIDI pitch bend to “scrub” (from the old practice of controlling
the speed at which analog tape passed by the playback heads by turning both reels with your hands). You
can step the scrub bar one frame to the left or one frame to the right (and hear the spectrum at that one
frame of time) by using the left and right arrow keys.
Clearing and Deleting
There are two ways to “remove” material from the spectrum. One is to simply set the amplitude of the
track to zero for all or part of its duration. This effectively removes it from the mix so it has no effect on
the resynthesis during those times when its amplitude is zero. The other is to actually delete it from the
analysis file.
In the spectrum editor, zeroing the amplitude is called “clearing”, and removing entire time segments is
called “deleting”. Clearing is used to zero the amplitude of all or part of a track’s duration, and deleting is
used purely in the same sense that it has in a waveform editor — that of deleting a segment of time from
the file.
Extracting Portions of a Spectrum File
You can copy a region and paste it into a Sound file window, where it will show up as a SumOfSines. You
can then time-stretch and/or frequency-scale that region of the spectrum and end up with a complex
timbre that does not necessarily sound anything like the original analysis from which it was extracted. By
putting several of these SumOfSines into a Mixer, you can construct dense textures from bits and pieces
of several spectra.
Modifying
The amplitude and frequency envelopes associated with each track can be modified by redrawing them
or by applying a “filter” or algorithm to all tracks within the selected region.
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