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.

There’s always been a disconnect between musical instruments and technology. On one hand, we view instruments as things that take years of dedication and practice to master, while the unabashed goal of technology is to make the things we do, from basic communication to art creation, easier, and shall we say, more "democratic." With synthesizers, there has always been a steep learning curve involved with the art of sound design, however manufacturers have repeatedly found that most using these instruments, hardware or software, never stray far from the factory presets. Now let’s take a company like Native Instruments, who have developed an extraordinary line of unique, powerful instruments. How do they reconcile the two, staying on the cutting edge while serving the needs of the marketplace?

In the last couple of years, NI has been promoting its Kore system as a way to simplify working with massive software synthesizer patch libraries. Kore uses a database and browser to organize patches, formatted as Kore sounds, by sound categories. For those who have NI Komplete, this makes for a very powerful way to access sounds while in the production process. Typically, when looking for a bass sound, one would have to open each synth, browse for suitable patches, write them down, open another synth, and repeat the process, over and over again. This gets tiring fast; –not what attracted any of us to electronic music in the first place. With Kore, the patch browser lists all patches designated as bass patches, regardless of which instrument they’re from. They can be opened, auditioned and used in a project, all within Kore.

While on the surface it may seem like we’re opening a new synth each time we call up a patch, we’re actually running off the Kore Sound Engine. What NI has done is built the sound engines for REAKTOR, MASSIVE, ABSYNTH, FM8, KONTAKT and GUITAR RIG into Kore, so when any Kore sound is loaded the engine is ready to go. Pretty cool…

So what’s the next step? Give the software away…free. At NAMM NI announced that a free Kore Player would be available in March, and the company will be selling soundpacks for 59.00 each. The player will have all the sound engine capabilities of the full Kore 2 version with a starting collection of 30 patches. While this is a remarkable development in the electronic instrument industry, giving away the synth but selling the patches, this is a model that we see more and more with technology tools. You need to look no farther than the printer you probably got free when you bought a computer to understand that the cost is in the toner, not the machine. And so it goes for software synthesizers.

It will be interesting to see how this flies in the marketplace. While there seems to be some support for the business model, soundware never appeared to be much of a moneymaker in the music tech industry. But, when you take a look at how musicians actually use synthesizers, as opposed to how they say they use them, our friends in Berlin may be on to something.