Kyma

Kyma (κύμα) is a Greek word meaning wave.

Kyma may also mean:

Kyma (automobile)

The Kyma was an English automobile manufactured from 1903 to 1905. Built by the New Kyma Car Company of Peckham, it came in 6 hp (4.5 kW) twin-cylinder models of three and four wheels.

See also

References

David Burgess Wise, The New Illustrated Encyclopedia of Automobiles

Kyma (sound design language)

Kyma is a visual programming language for sound design used by musicians, researchers, and sound designers. In Kyma, a user programs a multiprocessor DSP by graphically connecting modules on the screen of a Macintosh or Windows computer.

Background

Kyma has characteristics of both object-oriented and functional programming languages. The basic unit in Kyma is the "Sound" object, not the "note" of traditional music notation. A Sound is defined as:

i) a Sound atom
ii) a unary transform T(s) where s is a Sound
iii) an n-ary transform T(s₁, s₂,.., s_n), where s₁,s₂,..s_n are Sounds

A Sound atom is a source of audio (like a microphone input or a noise generator), a unary transform modifies its argument (for example, a LowpassFilter might take a running average of its input), and an n-ary transform combines two or more Sounds (a Mixer, for example, is defined as the sum of its inputs).

History

The first version of Kyma, which computed digital audio samples on a Macintosh 512K was written in the Smalltalk programming language in 1986 by Carla Scaletti in Champaign, Illinois. In May 1987, Scaletti had partitioned Kyma into graphics and sound generation engines and ported the sound generation code to a digital signal processor called the Platypus designed by Lippold Haken and Kurt J. Hebel of the CERL Sound Group.