Kyma is called recombinant sound. This means nothing except having a cool name. Kyma is in fact similar to MAX; it's a visual programming language for creating sound of all kinds. One of the largest differences between MAX and Kyma is that Kyma requires its own hardware.

When you pay for a Kyma system, you receive the Kyma software and the Capybara box, which connects to your computer via an ISA, Nubus, PCI, or PCMCIA interface card. This box has four Motorola 56309 DSP chips and 96 MB of sample RAM. To it, you can add up to 12 expansion cards which have 2 additional DSP's and 48MB of RAM each.

Kyma has been used in several notable songs, one of which is *NSYNC's Pop, with vocal treatments by BT. BT also used the Kyma to synthesis the words "Mathematics is the language of nature" in The Fibonacci Sequence.