The Kyma Language for Sound Design, Version 4.5

First, Kyma asks you to invest some time in learning the language. Your reward will be a fluency for creating
an infinite variety of new sounds that no one has ever heard before! Once you learn the basic
vocabulary of Sounds and the few simple rules for combining them, you will achieve a kind of critical
mass when your knowledge and facility in the language will start increasing at an exponential rate.
At some point, you will find yourself thinking in Kyma, dreaming in Kyma, designing all of your sounds
in Kyma, wondering how you ever got along without it, wondering why your friends are agonizing over
how to do things that you would find simple to whip up in Kyma.
Sound on the Computer
What is the domain of this language? What exactly are we synthesizing and manipulating in Kyma?
9
Analog-to-Digital
Converter .
01001100
11101111
10001010
.
Digital-to-Analog
Converter
Sample Storage
and/or
Signal Processing
.
01001100
11101111
10001010
.
Digital audio can be thought of as a symmetric process of turning acoustic air pressure variations into a
voltage signal, into a stream of numbers, and then reversing the process to get from the stream of numbers,
to a voltage signal, and back into a changing air pressure.
♦ Physical sound is a variation in air pressure. You can detect these changes in air pressure using a
transducer like a microphone which has a diaphragm inside that moves back and forth in response to
changes in air pressure and translates this variation in air pressure into a continuously varying voltage.
♦ You can use an analog-to-digital converter to measure (or “sample”) the value of this continuously
varying voltage at evenly spaced time intervals to produce a stream of numbers corresponding to the
instantaneous amplitudes of that sound at those points in time.
♦ As you convert the continuous voltage into a stream of discrete numbers, you can save them onto a
hard disk or a CD.
♦ Later, you can read those numbers off the CD in the same order, feed them to a digital-to-analog converter
which filters or interpolates between the discrete values, turning them back into a continuously
varying voltage.
♦ You can feed this voltage to a speaker which translates the voltage changes into movements of a diaphragm
which pushes the air around, thus recreating the air pressure variations.
This entire process is, by now, ubiquitous and familiar to everyone as the process of digital recording.
However, once you have converted the acoustic sound into a stream of numbers, you open up all kinds of
possibilities for manipulating that stream of numbers on the computer.