The Kyma Language for Sound Design, Version 4.5

The sampling rate can be set to 48, 44.1, 24, 22.050, or 11.025 khz using the DSP Status window. This is the
rate at which audio signals are updated on the Capybara.
Randomly Accessing Sounds
Suppose that you have several different Sounds and that you would like to be able to start and stop them
at will, in any order? For example, you might be accompanying a live performer, in which case you
would want to be able to synchronize the start and end times of synthesized sounds, samples, and/or
processing of the live input. Or you might be setting up a psychoacoustic experiment in which you want
to randomize the order in which the stimuli are presented to a subject.
There are two approaches to solving this problem, depending on the amount of processing time you have
available, how quickly the transitions must be between Sounds, and whether you require cross-fading
between the Sounds.
Mixer model
If you would like any possible succession of Sounds with cross-fading between them, you must put an
amplitude envelope on each of the Sounds, and place all of them into a single Mixer. If you assign each
Sound a unique trigger, you will be able to trigger any Sound at any time and they will overlap by the
duration of the decay of the first one and the attack time on the second. This presupposes that you have
enough computing power to compute all of these Sounds simultaneously.
The Special Case of Samples and Disk Recordings
If all of the Sounds that you want to trigger happen to be either disk tracks or samples, there is an alternate
solution. Using a KeyMappedMultisample, you can trigger any of several disk files (or samples) as
long as they are all stored in the same folder on your disk. Using a MIDIVoice or MIDIMapper to define
polyphony, you can specify the number of disk files that could be sounding at one time. If all you want is
a simple crossfade between disk files, for example, you can get by with a polyphony of 2.
Compiled Sound Grid
If you do not have to crossfade between Sounds, you can use a compiled Sound grid for the purpose of
randomly accessing Sounds. The idea behind the compiled Sound grid is that you do the first step of the
Compile, load, start process — the compile step — to all Sounds in the grid at once, and save the results
on disk. Then you can do the final two steps — loading and starting — at the moment you want to actually
play the Sound. Because you have done the most time consuming part of the processing ahead of
time, you can load and start arbitrary Sounds in an arbitrary order much more quickly.
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