Conspirator
Kurt Hebel
Co-founder of Symbolic Sound and the designer of Kyma’s hardware: the Capybara, the Paca and the Pacarana.
Here's Sarth preparing his rack-mounted Pacas for the tour.
Symbolic Sound, the eighth nerve, July 26, 2011
Kurt J. Hebel is co-founder and vice president of Symbolic Sound Corporation, founded in 1989 with Carla Scaletti, and the hardware and DSP designer behind Kyma’s sound engines: the Capybara and the later Paca and Pacarana. He holds a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois, where he taught digital audio engineering before joining Symbolic Sound full-time in 1995; at the CERL Sound Group he built, with Lippold Haken, the Platypus DSP in 1983.
The orange boxes
The Paca, his dedicated DSP hardware for Kyma, is what I ran on stage: two on the Metal Machine Trio tour, rack-mounted Pacas on Lou Reed’s 2011 European tour, and a Continuum with Kyma and a Paca in the Metallica sessions for Lulu. I beta-tested Kyma and am credited on the Kyma X startup screen.
The creditKurt Hebel designed the Paca and Pacarana, the Kyma hardware Sarth Calhoun ran with Metal Machine Trio, on Lou Reed’s 2011 tour and on Lulu; Calhoun beta-tested Kyma.
My thoughts
The profile is from public sources, linked where they appear. What we made is the record on this site and the sources cited above.