Carla Scaletti (born April 28, 1956) is an American composer, harpist, music technologist and the inventor of the Kyma (sound design language) and co-founder of Symbolic Sound Corporation.
Biography Carla Scaletti was born in Ithaca, New York. Raised by entrepreneurial educators, her early fascination with science was heavily influenced by her microbiologist father. She relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1964. Scaletti completed a Bachelor of Music from the University of New Mexico, a Master of Music from Texas Tech University, and both a Master of Computer Science and a Doctor of Musical Arts in music composition from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). In the 1970s, she worked as the principal harpist in the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra and the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra, and composed for acoustic instruments before shifting her focus toward computer-generated music.
Scaletti served as a visiting assistant professor of music at UIUC before working as a researcher at the CERL Sound Group. In 1986, she outlined the initial design for Kyma in a paper titled "Kyma: A Computer Language for the Representation of Music". In 1989, Scaletti co-founded the Symbolic Sound Corporation with Kurt J. Hebel as a spinoff of the CERL Sound Group to commercialize her Kyma sound generation computer language. From 2000 to 2007, she lectured at the Center for the Creation of Music Iannis Xenakis (CCMIX) in Paris.
Scaletti refers to her compositions as "mu-psi" (music and science fiction), actively differentiating between data sonification for scientific research and data-driven music. She specializes in "Auditory Analytics," using sonification for scientific exploration. In 2024 and 2026, she co-authored papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences applying sonification to protein folding dynamics and hydrogen bonds.
Scaletti has published professional articles in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the Journal of Chemometrics, the Computer Music Journal, Perspectives of New Music, and the proceedings of the OOPSLA and SPIE conferences, as well as several book chapters. In 2006, she was interviewed by Tara Rodgers for her work at the intersection of music and science. She has delivered keynotes at the International Computer Music Conference (2015), the International Conference on Auditory Display (2017), and the Audio Developer Conference (2024). Among her honors, Scaletti received the Distinguished Alumnae Award for contributions in the field of music from Texas Tech University (2003), the SEAMUS Award (2017), the WIFTS Sound Award (2017), and a Sonification Award in data analysis (2025).
Works Scaletti composes computer-generated music. Selected works include:
Year Title Description 1977 Motet For mezzo-soprano, narrator, harp, and bass clarinet. 1981 Yes For mezzo-soprano and electronic sound. 1982 Blood Wedding Incidental music for Garcia Lorca's play. 1983 Lysogeny For harp and computer-generated sound, exploring genetic and musical mutation using a model of a lysogenic virus. 1986 X bar For piano and live electronics. 1986 Levulose For bass and computer-generated sound. 1987 sunSurgeAutomata Computer-generated sound piece exploring a Cellular Automata algorithm. 1989 Trinity For voice and interactive electronics, representing her first composition using the Kyma system. 1994 Mitochondria Computer-generated sound. 1995 Public Organ Interactive electronics. 1999 Lament For voice and interactive electronics. 1999 Tangled Timelines For harp and interactive electronics. 2002 Frog Pool Farm Live Kyma system piece utilizing field recordings of a frog chorus. 2008 SlipStick For Continuum fingerboard controlling interactive electronics. 2008 Cyclonic Live synthesis piece emulating a storm using a soundscape of field recordings and synthesized sounds. 2010 Autocatalysis Audience participation piece modeling a dynamical Brusselator system. 2011 Spider Galaxies Contemporary dance piece by Gilles Jobin, co-composed with Cristian Vogel. 2011 ...odd kind of sympathy For audience processed through Kyma. 2013 QUANTUM Data-driven music soundtrack for Gilles Jobin's choreography, based on ATLAS experiment data from the Large Hadron Collider. 2014 Conductus For organ, three singers, and Kyma, exploring the diffusion of sound and modeling a gene transcription regulation network. 2016 Double-well Audience-interactive piece modeling a dynamical double-well potential inspired by the Higgs Boson. 2017 Bubble & Squeak For performer processed through Kyma. 2017 h—>gg A QUANTUM suite exploring knowledge acquired through inference rather than direct observation. 2017 The Strip of Möbius Live improvisation with Rich O'Donnell and Anna Lum. 2017 VR_I 3D music and sound design for Gilles Jobin's virtual reality dance piece. 2018 Wí Shpá, A journey in bare feet Data-driven score for choreographer Minerva Muñoz. 2019 Rupture For Kyma and iPad, mapping 3D seismological data from the El Mayor-Cucapah earthquake. 2023 misfold For organ and live Kyma electronics, inspired by scientific concepts related to proteins.
Kyma language has been used to prepare the soundtracks of films including: War of the Worlds Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith Finding Nemo Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones WALL-E The Dark Knight Master and Commander
Kyma language has been used to prepare the soundtracks of video games including:
World of Warcraft Mirror's Edge Dark Messiah Quake II Mage Knight
References
External links
Interviews with Carla Scaletti "Why Sonification is a Joke" (2017), keynote address at the International Conference on Auditory Display "Sonic Cartography: Navigating the Abstract Space-Time of Sound" (2024), keynote address at the Audio Developer Conference Carla Scaletti publications indexed by ORCID Carla Scaletti publications indexed by Google Scholar