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 g ...

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 (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Universit ...

. 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 sound tracks for a variety of needs. It involves specifying, acquiring or creating auditory elements using audio production techniques and tools. It is employed in a variety of disciplines including ...

for music, film, advertising, television, speech and hearing research, computer games, 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 Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") betwee ...

s. The company is based in

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

. 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 form. In digital audio, the sound wave of the audio signal is typically encoded as numerical samples in a continuous sequence. For example, in CD audio, sa ...

signal processing. The Kyma Sound design language, based on

Smalltalk Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Ka ...

, 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