Kyma is a sound design language that is “sounds all the way down”.
In Andrew Telichan-Phillips article, based on interviews with the creators of SuperCollider, ChucK, Max, and Kyma, “Encoding Sound: Perspectives on Cultural Bias in Music Software Design” Computer Music Journal Volume 48, Number 3, pp 18-34, James McCartney describes Kyma as:
Kyma is a language that is written like a high-level language. It provides you with prototype sounds that come supplied with arguments and inputs. You can plug these into other sounds, then take everything and generate machine code—so, all the way from this high-level representation down to machine code… So, in many ways, this would probably be the most ideal language in terms of giving you simultaneous access to high- and low-level processes. You can choose to work either visually or textually in this sense.
At the Audio Developers Conference in 2024, I talked about some of the ideas and motivations behind Kyma as a strategy for exploring the space of all possible sounds.
Listen Closely: Thanks to Special Effects, Movies Have Been Given A Whole New Look. Get Ready for a Whole New Sound. Wall Street Journal, Thursday, March 19, 1998, pg R8 by Eben Shapiro:
The hot new technique sound-effects designers are toying with is morphing, a concept analogous to the one that changed the face of visual effects in the early 1990s in movies like “Terminator2:Judgment Day,” “Death Becomes Her” and “Jurassic park.”
The technique is made possible by Kyma, a hardware and software system developed by Symbolic Sound Corp. in Champaign, Ill., a college town far from the Hollywood-Silicon Valley network. Symbolic Sound was founded in 1989 by graduates of the University of Illinois, the same campus that spawned Marc Andreesen and other student programmers who developed the Netscape software for navigating the Internet.
