The Kyma Language for Sound Design, Version 4.5

Compile, load, start
Compile
Load
Start
How does Kyma take the graphical representation of the signal flow (a Sound with an uppercase “S”) and
turn that into actual sound (lowercase “s”) that you can hear? When you select Compile, load, start from
the Action menu (or, more expediently, use the key equivalent of Ctrl+Space Bar), Kyma compiles the
Sound, loads it into the Capybara, and tells the Capybara to start its time-counter.
First, Kyma rewrites the graphical representation of signal flow into a sequence of time-tagged instructions
to the Capybara. At the same time, it also compiles any parameter field expressions, so that they can
be evaluated in real-time by the real-time expression evaluator on the Capybara. Also at the same time,
Kyma is deciding how it should split up your signal flow diagram into subparts that can be assigned to
different expansion cards on your Capybara (remember that you have at least two expansion cards in
your Capybara and may have as many as eight of them). In other words, Kyma keeps track of how much
sample RAM is left on each card and how much processing each card is being asked to do and uses this
information to decide where to schedule each part of your Sound.
During the compile step, you will see cursor change to a watch, and you may be asked to help locate
samples, MIDI files, or other external files needed by your Sound. Kyma will search for a file for some
amount of time and then put up a dialog asking whether you prefer to locate it yourself or whether Kyma
should keep looking; if you know exactly where the file is, it can be quicker to find it yourself; otherwise,
just hit Enter and Kyma will eventually find it. ‡
Once the time-tagged sequence of instructions has been divided up among the processors, Kyma sends
the information to the Capybara. During this step, the cursor changes to an animated icon of a host computer
downloading information to the Capybara.
During this time, Kyma will also download any samples or wavetables required by the Sound from the
hard disk of your host computer into the sample memory on your Capybara. Whenever a sample is being
loaded into the Capybara, the cursor changes to a picture of a waveform being downloaded into the
Capybara.
Once enough of this information has been loaded, Kyma tells the Capybara to start the time-counter. You
can always tell when the Sound is playing (even if it is silent) because the cursor turns hollow; the Capybara
will tell the host computer when the duration of that Sound has expired, so the cursor will be filled
in again at the termination of that Sound.
‡ Your Sounds often require “external” files such as samples, wavetables, MIDI files, text files, analysis files, etc. To
speed up the process of compiling you should specify the folders or directories containing these files as your Frequently
Used Folders in the Preferences (accessed from the Edit menu). For example, you might keep all of your
waveforms in one folder, all of your samples in subfolders of a samples folder, all of your MIDI files in another. Or
you might prefer to keep all of the files used in a particular project in subdirectories of a single directory associated
with that project. However you choose to organize your files, specifying them in the Frequently Used Folders will
allow Kyma to locate them more quickly as it compiles your Sounds.
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