Symbolic Sound Corporation was founded by

Carla Scaletti Carla Scaletti (born April 28, 1956) is an American harpist, composer, music technologist and the inventor of the Kyma Sound Design Environment as well as president of Symbolic Sound. Biography Carla Scaletti was born in Ithaca, New York. She ...

and Kurt J. Hebel in 1989 as a spinoff of the CERL Sound Group at the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory of the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. Established in 1867, it is the f ...

. Originally named ''Kymatics'', the company was incorporated as Symbolic Sound Corporation in March 1990. Symbolic Sound's products are being used in

sound design Sound design is the art and practice of creating auditory elements of media. It involves specifying, acquiring and creating audio using production techniques and equipment or software. It is employed in a variety of disciplines including filmmaking ...

for music, film, advertising, television, speech and hearing research,

computer games A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual fe ...

, and other

virtual environment A virtual environment is a networked application that allows a user to interact with both the computing environment and the work of other users. Email, chat, and web-based document sharing applications are all examples of virtual environments. Sim ...

s. The company is based in

Bozeman, Montana Bozeman ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Gallatin County, Montana, United States. The 2020 United States census put Bozeman's population at 53,293, making it Montana's fourth-largest city. It is the principal city of the Bozeman, Montan ...

. 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 Digital audio is a representation of sound recorded in, or converted into, digital signal (signal processing), digital form. In digital audio, the sound wave of the audio signal is typically encoded as numerical sampling (signal processing), ...

signal processing. The Kyma Sound design language, based on

Smalltalk Smalltalk is a purely object oriented programming language (OOP) that was originally created in the 1970s for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, but later found use in business. It was created at Xerox PARC by Learni ...

, 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'', ''aggregate synthesis'', ''granular synthesis'', and ''Tau synthesis''. They have also developed algorithms for partitioning a signal flow graph to run on multiple parallel processors and multiple devices in real time.

External links

Symbolic Sound Corporation

References

Music equipment manufacturers Acoustics software Computer-based Education Research Laboratory American companies established in 1989 Companies based in Montana {{tech-company-stub