I'm glad I came across this thread. I've been researching the same topic since ISAM came out. I've scowered the internet for information and ended up buying the Kyma system. I think I can clear a lot of this up. I have created a journal on my experience with Kyma since the box first arrived at my doorstep. You can check the blog out here:
http://www.syncretia.com/wordpress/
"Kyma" the secret to Amon Tobin's abstract sounds?
I'm reluctant to believe that it is the "secret" of his abstract sounds. I'm sure it's an element but I wouldn't call it the secret. I'll explain more as I go along.
Unfortunately to run Kyma it looks like you need to purchase the Paca ($2970) or the Pacarana ($4402) which are external pieces of hardware.
Actually, it ends up being a lot more expensive than that. In order to get mine set up and sent to Australia, the shipping for a Paca cost about $250, and then I got stung with quarantine charges of about $300. You also need to buy a dedicated audio interface for Kyma. It doesn't have an in built audio interface. I ended up spending $350 on one, but if I knew what was I doing when I bought one, I would have bought a much cheaper one. You basically have to buy an interface that is on this list:
http://www.symbolicsound.com/cgi-bin/bi ... Converters
But, even if you already have one of these, you'll need to buy another one because you need to output sound from the converter to your computer's audio interface in order to bring sound in to your DAW or other recording software.
my lecturer has a kyma system.
It's helps when thinking about Kyma to understand where Kyma comes from. It was created in the 90s by an academic, for academics. At the same time, many different modular platforms went off in different directions e.g. Reaktor, Max/MSP, Supercollider, CSound, Pure Data and so on. Different groups of people adopted the different platforms for different reasons. For example, Reaktor was adapted by the electronic music community because it had the backing of the massive company Native Instruments and was a cheap software based platform as opposed to Kyma's expensive DSP approach. In my opinion, the main reason that Kyma is considered the holy grail of sound design is that professional, academic and film based sound designers adopted it in the early days and she Kyma system evolved alongside the academic discipline of sound design.
you could (with a lot of time) code similar tools that come bundled with Kyma X in Max/Csound/Chuck/whatever other programming language you use [...] a lot of the value comes from having lots of tools at your fingertips ready from the get go
Kontakt has this feature called authentic expression technology. Yesterday I tried to morph a snare drum into a tabla, but it seems like all kontact did was take the frequency data from the tabla and apply a weird eq to the snare to make it occupy the same frequencies as the tabla did. It sounded horrible. Is alchemys spectral morphing anybetter?
Yes. A lot of people (including me) have gotten caught up by ISAM in to thinking that most of the sounds on ISAM were created with Kyma. My guess is that this actually unlikely because there are so many other synths and effects etc. out there that can create similar sounds without going to all the trouble of building Kyma sounds from the ground up. Let me put it this way. If you want to create a sound in Kyma, you have to fire up the DSP, open up the software, route a midi cable from your computer's audio interface to Kyma's interface, route audio from Kyma to your computer's audio interface, design the sound (patch) and record the sound coming from Kyma in your DAW, or use Kyma's disk utility to write the output to disk and drag it in to your DAW. That's a lot of screwing around when a lot of the stuff that Kyma does can be done in other software synths by merely dragging samples in or hitting a preset.
Out of the box Reaktor and Max/MSP are too fantastic platforms that already have 100s of patches which make ISAM type sounds. One excellent Reaktor based synth that I used is called Skanner XT. It is excellent and only costs about $75. I thoroughly recommend checking it out. If you have the full version of Reaktor, you can actually rip the patch apart and see how it is created so that you can build your own granular whackiness.
Although I am not thoroughly familar with CSound and Supercollider etc. I would thoroughly recommend looking at some of the platforms before jumping in to Kyma. Here is a company that produces Ableton specific plugins based on the CSound platform. You don't need to know any code or do any crazy crap to get these working, just install and go!
http://www.csoundforlive.com/
Kontakt has this feature called authentic expression technology. Yesterday I tried to morph a snare drum into a tabla, but it seems like all kontact did was take the frequency data from the tabla and apply a weird eq to the snare to make it occupy the same frequencies as the tabla did. It sounded horrible. Is alchemys spectral morphing anybetter?
Yep. I couldn't get anything good out of Kontakt or Alchemy's "spectral" morphing stuff. Alchemy does have additive morphing though - which is an added bonus. Kyma has a completely different apprach to these two platforms. Kyma comes with the TAU editor which analyses the content of samples in terms of frequency, amplitude and format envelope (spectrum) over time. You can then manually merge the envelopes from 2 or more samples and then play the merged samples and change the morphing of the different envelopes by controlling those parameters with a controller. None of this can be done in Kontakt or Alchemy.
They basically just take a guess as to how you would like to morph the samples together. Image Line's Harmor seems to be taking a new approach to morphing that may be well worth looking at.
I'd actually say his continuum is the secret - through various methods anybody can do some basic "spectral morphing" (alchemy does it out the box) or program in the aforementioned languages, and i actually made some tobin-like sounds from my field recordings, through a combination of alchemy and hourglass, but when it came to making these sounds into something reeeeally cool, it was obvious that a standard keyboard/piano roll system doesn't allow you to fully explore the sounds easily.
This brings me to slipstick synthesis. This type of synthesis seems to be peculiar to Kyma and Tobin seems to use it a lot on ISAM. I believe that this is what he is using when he plays the Haken Continuum. I believe that the song Mass and Spring is an allusion to the type of synthesis. Unfortunately, I can't find much information on Google about it but basically this is what it looks/sounds like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAVLrtOrcyc
In this video: Y axis = cycles per grain (morph to bells), X axis = density/pitch. Z axis = freq jitter/velocity, (external controller dur jitter, pan).
The good news is that you don't need to buy a Haken Continuum to use this. You can use any controller to control this including an iPad with custom made interfaces. Kyma seems to have good OSC support because I have been using TouchOSC to control various parameters inside Kyma sounds. It seems though that the best controller for slipstick other than the Haken Continuum is actually a Wacom Intuos graphic tablet. It's simply a tablet that you can use a pen with. Out of the box Kyma support this natively and can take advantage of many of its tactile features such as pen pressure (which could be used for the Z axis). You can assign the X axis as the pitch in the same way that the continuum works. I've also heard that there is an actual OSC driver for the Intuos which can route multi touch features to Kyma. But, I'm not sure if slip stick synthesis would actually take advantage of that.
Conclusion
Only buy Kyma if you have plenty of spare cash lying around and are willing dedicate a serious amoung of time to learning it. It will only pay off after using it for a very long time. Maybe a year or more. It's not like Reaktor where you can just go straight the user library and download tonnes of great patches for free. Experiment with other synths first and find out if they meet your needs. The jury is still out for me on whether or not Kyma is a worthwhile pursuit. I truly hope that in a year's time I am a Kyma guru and can create all the sounds that I've wanted to create on Kyma, but I don't know if that will happen, and I don't know if I could be getting the same sounds on other platforms more easily.
Some tools for you to look at:
Spectral/Additive Morphing in Alchemy (I've heard some Tobin like sounds coming from this. A little birdy told me that he has a license of this)
http://www.camelaudio.com/Alchemy.php
AET Function in Kontakt
http://www.native-instruments.com/#/en/ ... kontakt-5/
Harmor
http://www.image-line.com/documents/harmor.html
Skanner XT
http://www.native-instruments.com/#/en/ ... kanner-xt/
Soundmagic Spectral (a free set of effects for manipulating spectral content)
http://www.michaelnorris.info/software/ ... ctral.html
CSound (Synth Programming platform)
http://www.csounds.com/
Super Collider (Synth Programming platform)
http://supercollider.sourceforge.net/
Please post any tools I have missed here! I would love to get my hands on more granular and spectral manipulation synths!
