Co-founder of Symbolic Sound Corporation (
https://kyma.symbolicsound.com/), Carla Scaletti is the creator of the Kyma language, a sound design environment used extensively in film, games, music, and scientific research.
In addition to her work as a software developer, Scaletti composes experimental electronic music for live performance, contemporary dance, and virtual reality. Since 1990, she has been one of the pioneers helping to establish the field of data sonification: using sound to explore, interpret, and communicate complex scientific data.
At the University of Illinois, she earned a doctorate in music composition with a minor in psychoacoustics, alongside a master's degree in computer science. Among her composition professors was Salvatore Martirano, creator of the hybrid digital-analog composing machine known as the Sal-Mar Construction (
https://distributedmuseum.illinois.edu/exhibit/sal-mar_construction). Her computer science advisor, Ralph Johnson, was one of the "Gang of Four" who revolutionized software development with their book on design patterns for object-oriented programming (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns).
During her time as a graduate student and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Illinois, Dr. Scaletti was a member of the CERL Sound Group, where she collaborated with a group of fellow students who would go on to notable careers in audio signal processing, among them:
• Kurt J. Hebel: Co-founder of Symbolic Sound and designer of Kyma's audio processing units.
• Lippold Haken: Founder of Haken Audio and inventor of the Continuum Fingerboard.
• Charlie Q. Robinson: Dolby researcher and winner of a 2024 technical Oscar for the Atmos audio format.
• Kelly Fitz: Principal DSP Algorithm Engineer at
Eargo.com and developer of the Loris open source sound modeling & processing software
• Richard G. Baraniuk: Rice University Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Founder of the open education initiative OpenStax
