Sound from a Virtual Planet

There’s something innately appealing to us about human sounds, the sound of a voice, hands clapping, whistling, vocal beat-boxing. Sound designers have been acutely aware of this, and have used the voice to create innumerable sound effects –the mouth is their secret weapon. One of the first classic sounds from the early days of sampling was the sound a human blowing air across the top of a glass bottle. More recently, Bjork explored the possibilities of human sounds in her haunting work Medulla, where just about all the sounds on the CD are derived from the voice or body. While it’s easy to record the sound of humans, making expressive sampled instruments from those recordings can be a daunting challenge.

This spring, SONiVOX released an interesting sample library aptly named Anatomy. Anatomy is a massive collection of 856 sampled instruments formatted for Native Instrument’s Kontakt 2 or 3. All the sounds in the collection are derived from some sound produced by the human body, and are divided into two categories: man and machine. Sounds that are distinctly human like singing and screaming are in the Man category. Those listed as Machine are sounds that have been mangled beyond recognition to create all sorts of instrument sounds, from drums and basses to pads and leads. While this is not the first time human sounds have been made available in a sample library, the sheer size of this collection is unprecedented.

While some of the instruments included here, like the vocal beat-boxing kits, are what you would expect to find, the real strength of this library is in the range of unexpected permutations that bear no resemblance to the original recorded source. Even sounds that are bizarre or aggressive have a certain appealing quality to them. SONiVOX provides some demos on their website, and here are a couple done by former students of mine from Berklee:

Anatomy Demo 0 - composed by Ben Cantil - 3,228k

Anatomy Demo 2 - composed by Stephanie Olmanni - 2,037k

To further entice you, SONiVOX offers ten of the Kontakt instruments as free downloads that will allow you to load and experiment with these on your own.

SONiVOX Anatomy Free Samples

If there is any critique of the library, it’s that you need to own Kontakt to use it. For the last few years, manufacturers have been relying on various sample players, like Kontakt Player used in the Garritan Personal Orchestra, to deliver programmed content. When you buy a library, the player is included. This has the distinct advantage of insuring compatibility, and eliminates the need for manufacturers to develop the same library for multiple sampler formats. However, for anyone interested in developing their sound design chops, there’s a big advantage to delivering the library as Kontakt instruments. You can open any of the instruments in Kontakt and see exactly how it was programmed; educational opportunities abound with examples of both standard and more exotic programming techniques.

All to often we segregate synthesis into two broad categories: subtractive synthesis, where the source of sound is some sort of geometric waveshape, like the typical square wave or sawtooth, or sampling which starts with digital audio file. However, things always get interesting in a boarder town, and some really creative and interesting sound design comes from the crossbreeding of these two types of synthesis. Unfortunately when it comes to sampling, the main focus of commercial sound libraries is usually in emulating existing instruments, often either drums or orchestral families. The goal of these is to provide the most realistic recreation, and indeed many current libraries, in skilled hands, yield stunning results.

So far this year, two products have emerged that take a very creative approach to working with sampled sound and serve not only useful instruments, but as inspiration for further exploration– Plectrum from Vital Arts, distributed by Ilio, and Anatomy from SONiVOX. I’ll start with Plectrum and cover Anatomy in my next blog entry.

Plectrum is the brainchild of sound designer extraordinaire Geoff Gee, who cut his teeth creating many of the factory sounds for the Kurzweil K2xxx series of instruments. I first met Geoff when he did a presentation on creative sound design with the K2000 at Berklee. For this, he started by recording the sound of a match strike into the synth, then proceeded to mangle the source into a series of strange and wonderful sounds. Geoff has a remarkable ability to listen to a sound and imagine a world of possibilities, as well as the technical chops to come up with useful results. This is one of he hallmarks of a great sound designer.

Several years ago Geoff and his family left the Boston area for a farm in upstate New York, home to Vital Arts, the umbrella organization for the creative work he and his wife pursue. An old farm is a rich source for all sorts of natural found sounds, from plucked stings, glass objects and breaking twigs. Undoubtedly, Geoff had a field day (no pun intended) sampling his new surroundings. Some time later he came up with the remarkable collection of instruments that became Plectrum, using the powerful synthesis capabilities in GVI, the GigaStudio Virtual Instrument sound engine. One of the real strengths of this collection is that it’s designed to be very playable. On top of his sound design prowess, Geoff is a virtuoso pianist and everything he programs reflects his passion for expressive performance.

Geoff Gee talking about Plectrum at the 2007 AES Convention in NYC.

I got my first preview of Plectrum at the 2008 Winter NAMM last January. The floor of a trade show is not the best place for listening, and wasn’t till Geoff paid a visit to Berklee last month that I really got a chance to listen carefully and really hear what this collection was about. Geoff put Plectrum though it’s paces in a good listening environment and talked about the process of collecting and designing the sounds. Altogether there are 185 different instruments organized by category. While this is not your General MIDI sound set, Plectrum covers a wide range of musical functions, from exotic bass patches to pads, and yes, plucked instruments. The real standouts here are the namesake plucked sounds. Here, he’s done a remarkable job of creating sounds that are completely new and fresh, while at the same time, sound familiar.

Vital Arts MP3s Plectrum Demos

As of this writing Plectrum is only on the PC, but since Tascam has recently released a Mac version of GVI, it’ should be fully cross-platform very soon.