What is Kyma?

Kyma is a recombinant sound design environment that puts vast libraries of unique audio synthesis and processing modules at your fingertips, where you can combine them to quickly create fresh, original sounds that can’t be found anywhere else…

Kyma provides file editors to help prepare source materials;

In Kyma, if I can imagine it, I can create it.

— Chuck, composer/producer

There’s always more if you dig deeper

— AR Rahman composer, performer, producer, sound designer

A searchable Sound Browser that helps you locate the files and sounds you need (plus a roll-the-dice option that helps you find the ones you never realized you needed);

The most important thing is that it feels like Kyma presents me with a ‘clean slate’ and so does not get in the way of whatever my idea is. This allows me to better express my creativity, and in a more personal way.

— Robert Jarvis, musician

A comprehensive set of powerful building blocks called Prototypes;

And a graphical language for quickly and easily combining those building blocks into new synthesis and processing algorithms

with a versatile real-time parameter language for intelligent controls

I love Kyma. I consider it my main ‘instrument’ for thinking about audible or sonorous design.  The analog modular synth – which I am also very expressive with – can lack precision.  In contrast, Kyma has many depths of precision, which together make it an excellent platform for iterative ideation or sculpting in digital sound.

— Cristian Vogel, musician, sound designer (and more)

and automatically-generated, structured Virtual Control Surfaces where, with a single click, you can remap widgets to external controllers that communicate with Kyma via MIDI or Open Sound Control (OSC).

With multiple flavors of Oscilloscopes and Spectrum Analyzers to help visualize your audio signals;

Kyma is like an onion – once you understand something, peel back another layer!

— Geoff Hood (My wires are unconventional), electronic musician

And a profusion of helper windows with documentation, suggestions, guidance, and online assistance from the Kyma Community.

Kyma is almost like a hub for all of my interests, not just musical…I really would have gotten nothing done in the last year without it.

— Jim O’Rourke, Tokyo-based American musician, composer and record producer

Once you’ve designed your sounds, you can create live performance environments by sequencing and layering them in a Timeline that lets you pause or stop time so you can perform live with other performers or sync to picture,

Gilles Jobin’s QUANTUM

and automate some (or all) of the live controls

The overall personality of the [system] where audio quality and creative process are intimately intertwined is important for me.

— Anne La Berge, musician, flute-player, improviser, artistic collaborator

Or perform in the moment with the seamless, clickless, nonlinear random access Multigrid, switching between sources and modifiers with no interruption in the audio output.

It’s easy to get started with Kyma and impossible to outgrow out. That’s the power of recombinance and the true value of Kyma.

Inspiration

Every morning, Kyma prepares a new set of Sounds just for you and puts them in the Sons du jour folder, so you can start the day inspired by some fresh new Sounds.

Kyma sounds different from “all the same VST plugins everyone else is using”. This is an important factor for film/TV sound designers who need to produce sounds that meet the brief of the director but also sound fresh, exciting, new and different from everyone else. Using Kyma is their secret advantage. They are not using the same Creature Voice plugins everyone else is using . Building a Sound from scratch comes up with results unique to their studio— an original signature sound.

— Alan M Jackson

Kyma Galleries, with their automatic patch-generation, give you just the springboard you need to get started on your projects. In the Wave Editor Gallery, Kyma automatically generates hundreds of complex signal flow graphs, all based on your original sample, all from a single click.

In the Multigrid, you can rapidly explore any combination or sequence of sources and modifiers while recording the results;

or pause and ask Kyma to extract the current signal flow as a new Kyma Sound.

Once you’ve got a starting point, it’s a whole lot easier for inspiration to kick in.

Community

I am the person usually who is asked from all the others. The Kyma forum is actually the real first time that my own questions get answered too.

— Christian Schlösser

There’s nothing quite like the warm satisfying feeling of sharing your successes with the Kyma community. Share Sounds, links, samples, analyses, educational or work opportunities with your Kyma colleagues in the Community Library in the cloud.

Get technical in the Questions and Answers site or interact with fellow practitioners on Discord or in person at the annual Kyma International Sound Symposium (KISS). Kyma users are some of the most creative, intelligent, and dedicated sound fanatics you’ll ever meet; luckily they’re also some the friendliest.