KISS 2010: Kyma International Sound Symposium (review)

The Second International Kyma Symposium (KISS 2010) took place from 24–26 September 2010 at the Casino Baumgarten in Vienna, in a newly renovated building with grandiose ornamented rooms and decorated ceilings dating from 1890. The Casino Baumgarten became one of the main recording studios in Vienna during the 1960s and 1970s due to its excellent acoustics.

The 60 KISS 2010 presenters and practitioners were sound artists, sound designers, audio engineers, scholars, and educators from Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Australia. They congregated in one of the Casino's exuberant rooms for three days to share knowledge and common interests of the latest Symbolic Sound developments.

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The conference opened with the keynote speech by the president of Symbolic Sound Corporation, Carla Scaletti, entitled "Music is Not a Language: Non-symbolic Meaning in Sound." Her eloquent and well-researched speech on the theme "symbolic sound" raised many questions, such as: How is music communicated? How is sound represented and understood? Is sound symbolic? Is music a language? Does it contain meaning?

Ms. Scaletti stated that "language, culture, and music are feeding into each other and the environment is not just physical, not just biological, but also cultural." She proposed that music is not a language. But this does not imply that music does not have meaning. Music creates meaning in non-symbolic, non-referential ways. She referred to many authors in the fields of music, cognitive science, philosophy, and language; primary among them is Mark Johnson's 2007 book, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Readers can participate in open discussions on the subject of music, sound symbols, etc., at www.pphilosophyofsound.org/.

Ms. Scaletti ended the keynote speech with the following statement: "As sound designers and musicians we have direct access to people's minds; in a very deep and direct way, sounds reach people pre-verbally, mapping to experiences and patterns that they learn long before they develop mastering language and critical thinking and filtering. It does matter what kinds of sounds in music we create. Welcome to Kyma Symposium!"

The conference started with warm applause from an eager and impatient crowd anxious to hear the latest in Kyma development. Ms. Scaletti's speech had enough content to stimulate ideas of the importance of sound, symbols, language, and culture, and their interrelationships. This conversation on sound and its symbolic meaning sufficiently filled two long days.

Ms. Scaletti's presentation was followed by other papers on the same theme: Cristian Vogel's "Zencoded: What's Inside a Sound that has no Meaning?;" Hector Bravo Bernard's "The Role of Symbols and Representation in Musical Creation;" and Scott Miller's "Constructing Realities with Kyma."

These talks were followed by another presentation by Ms. Scaletti, entitled "What's New in Kyma?" She gave a short presentation of the latest changes in Kyma since the 2009 symposium in Barcelona (www.osculator.net/2009/09/09/kymasymposium-2009-in-barcelona/).

The first day of the conference ended with a performance of Nearly Ninety by John Paul Jones. Mr. Jones, bass player for the band Led Zeppelin, played a commissioned piece by choreographer Merce Cunningham in celebration of his 90th birthday. Mr. Jones used Kyma extensively for signal processing. The performance was obsessive, with rapid signal-processing changes juxtaposing and layering each other, reminiscent of rock and roll while taking a much fresher approach. The sounds of the guitar were heavily processed, close to unrecognizable, and never seemed to settle down. Mr. Jones applied many transformations to the guitar. Additionally, there was an abundance of crescendos with constantly moving sound effects (mostly in the mid-to-high frequency range), pitch shifting, and thick layers of sounds with few sustained notes in suspense. He completely dominated the Kyma system and the audience. Toward the end of...