The Kyma Language for Sound Design, Version 4.5

Algorithmic Splicing and Mixing
Scripts
To algorithmically specify when Sounds should start and how they should overlap in time, use the Script
Sound, found in the Algorithms category of the prototypes. The Script algorithmically constructs a Mixer
of Sounds within TimeOffsets according to a script. Each line of the script has the format
soundName start: aTime.
In other words, you type the name of an input, the word start:, and a time when a copy of the Sound
should start. Each of the inputs is used as a kind of model or template for creating a copy, so you can create
any number of copies of each input, each one starting at a different time and even overlapping with
each other in time.
For example, the script,
s1 start: 0 s.
s2 start: 1 s.
s1 start: 3 s.
would result in the following timeline:
s1
s2
0 1 2 3 4 5 6
You can extend the idea of templates even further by making some of the parameters of the input Sounds
variables instead of fixed constants. A variable is a word preceded by a question mark (and shows up in
green in the user interface). Then you can set the values of the variable parameters from the script. The
format for setting a variable parameter from the script is:
soundName start: aTime varName1: value1 … varNameN: valueN.
In other words, after assigning the Sound a start time, list the name of each variable followed by a colon
and the specific value that you would like to assign to that variable. For example, suppose you had a
Sound whose Frequency field was ?freq and whose Gain field was ?amp. You could use the following
line in a script to create a copy of that Sound whose frequency was 443 hertz, amplitude was one half, and
start time was 3.2 seconds:
aSound start: 3.2 s freq: 443 hz amp: 0.5.
As it turns out, these scripts are actually programs in the Smalltalk programming language. This can
come in very handy in cases where you have some systematic description of the Sound you want to create.
For example, say that you wanted to construct some new, strange kind of reverberation based on the
HarmonicResonator. You decide that you would like to create a Mixer of six of these resonators, each
with a slightly different resonant frequency. You could get a Mixer from the prototypes, open it up and
drag six copies of the HarmonicResonator one-by-one from the prototypes into the Mixer, then alter each
of the six Frequency fields one-by-one. Then if you wanted to adjust those settings, you would have to
open each of the six one-by-one in order to test out a different set of Frequency values. Or you could
instead leverage the power of programming and create those six copies in a loop:
1 to: 6 do: [ :i |
res
start: 0 s
freq: (0.5 * i + 25) hz].
Then you could change the number of resonators simply by changing the 6 to a 10 (or whatever). And
you could change the relationship between the frequencies, simply by changing the expression following
the freq: message.
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s1