Symbolic Sound Corporation

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Symbolic Sound Corporation was co-founded in Illinois in 1989 by musical technologists Carla Scaletti and Kurt J. Hebel.

The company was a spinoff of the pre-exisiting CERL Sound Group which grew out of the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

Originally named Kymatics, the company was incorporated as Symbolic Sound Corporation in March 1990. Symbolic Sound's products have since been used in sound design for music, film, advertising, television, speech and hearing research, computer games, and other virtual environments. The company is based in Bozeman, Montana.

Kyma, Symbolic Sound's main product, was one of the earliest commercially available examples of a graphical signal flow language for real time digital audio signal processing. [1] The Kyma Sound design language, based on Smalltalk, continues to evolve and runs on several generations of DSP processing units.

The company has developed and commercialized several audio processing and synthesis techniques, including real time spectral analysis and additive resynthesis, audio morphing, [2] aggregate synthesis, [3] granular synthesis, and Tau synthesis. [4] They have also developed algorithms for partitioning a signal flow graph to run on multiple parallel processors and multiple devices in real time.

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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.

Carla Scaletti Musical artist

Carla Scaletti is an American harpist, composer, music technologist and the inventor of the Kyma Sound Design Environment as well as president of Symbolic Sound.

References

  1. Moog, Robert (December 1987). "Platypus, Granules, Kyma, Daton, & the DSP56001 in Your Future". Keyboard. 13 (12).
  2. Shapiro, Eben. "Making Magic --- Listen Closely: Thanks to special effects, movies have been given a whole new look". Wall Street Journal. 1998 (March 19): R.8.
  3. "Symbolic Sound Unveils New Family of Sound Synthesis and Processing Algorithms" (Press release). Symbolic Sound Corporation. January 1, 2002.
  4. "Symbolic Sound Corporation Announces Tau" (Press release). Electronic Musician. February 21, 2006. Archived from the original on 2006-06-13.