Results for organic

Precisionsound has recently released Exosphere, a collection of soundscapes.

Featuring corrosive textures, unstable machines, electronic ambiences, and twisted voices, Exosphere is a creative toolkit for film, game, and multimedia sound design, as well as for producers of electronic music.

Exosphere features

• 50 stereo 48khz 24-bit WAV files.
• Over 55 minutes of audio.
• 1 program for all versions of Steinberg HALion.
• 1 program for NI Kontakt 1 and 2.
• 1 program with scripted GUI for NI Kontakt 3 and above.

While 50 samples might not seem like a lot, they’re over 1 minute each so you still get a total of 55 minutes of audio.

The sounds were designed to inspire music composers and sound designers by delivering lengthy loops with a wide dynamic range. To help identify sounds, the files have descriptive names like “Malfunctioning robot” and “Contamination zone”.

Static glitches, radiation crackles, chilling space winds, robotic bleeps, warbled voices, dark pad-like background ambiences… Exosphere!

The included patches map all sounds across the keyboard for easy auditioning. The Kontakt 3 patch also has some controls for Hi- and Lo-pass filters and stereo width.

Listen to Precisionsound’s demos below to get an idea of what Exosphere sounds like.

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So what do I think?

Exosphere is exactly what is says on the tin, a bunch of glitchy, threatening, and abstract soundscape loops. The atmosphere is seriously creepy, with a constant feeling that something is about to go horribly wrong.

The sounds are well designed with lots of movement and variations, without getting too complicated or being overly processed. The vibe and quality is consistent across the library. Organic, mechanical, unsettling, yet intriguing.

Well recommended!

More information: Precisionsound / Exosphere

Organic Synthesis by Sidsonic Libraries is a sample library featuring sounds from the Jupiter 80 synthesizer by Roland.

The Organic Synthesis from Rolands Jupiter 80 is the sound source of this sample pack. Expect the final frontier in Lead and synthesized sounds. The sound of this multisamplepack will touch your Soul and send your mind on vacation.

Organic Synthesis features

• 14 Sample Kits, 1530 MB content.
• All samples are recorded in 24 bit, 96 khz.
• Includes patches for Kontakt, EXS24, Reason NNXT, Structure (Kontakt and EXS24 are compatible with Ableton).

Organic Synthesis is available to purchase for 44.99 EUR. Three individual packs featuring a subset from the library are available as well.

More information: Sidsonic Libraries / Organic Synthesis

Sometimes I feel that we have so many virtual instruments and effects that it seems near impossible to come up with something new and exciting.

And then Sonic Charge brings Synplant, completely proving me wrong.

If you’re into electronic beats you may very well be familiar with Sonic Charge’s µTonic (or MicroTonic), Magnus Lidström’s top notch drum and percussion synth.

And if you’re a Reason user that name Magnus Lidström might ring a bell as well. Magnus worked on several things for Propellerhead Software, most notably designing and developing the Malström synth for Reason 2.0.

And now for something completely different

I hope you weren’t expecting I was going to tell you that Synplant is some kind of Malström 2.0… Just take a look at Synplant and compare that with Malström’s GUI.

This isn’t properly scaled, but I’m sure you’ll notice they don’t look much alike. Synplant has 7 sliders and a few buttons around the plant’s bulb, while Maltröm’s controls are… many.

Right, so let’s focus on Synplant then. Here’s what the product page reads:

Synplant is a software synthesizer with a genetic approach to sound creation. Instead of creating patches the conventional way by turning dials and knobs, Synplant lets you explore a world of organic sounds by planting seeds that grow into synth patches.

Aha, the lack of controls on that Synplant GUI is intentional! Btw, note how it says it has a genetic approach to sound creation, not generative. Although Synplant uses a generative synthesis engine, it isn’t actually a generative music system (you might’ve thought so when seeing the circle of notes on the interface…)

Synplant invites you to take a different approach to sound creation. Using seeds to plant, and branches to grow sounds isn’t something I’ve ever seen before.

Growing a sound?

Without going into the details of what kind of synthesizing goes on under the hood right now, Synplant is extremely easy to use:

1. Open a preset or create a Random Seed to generate a new sound.
2. Grow any of the 12 branches to alter the sound, from subtle tweaks to extreme changes as you pull the branches further out.
3. Plant branches you like as new seeds, or clone them so that all keys will play exactly the same sound.

This is quite an intuitive process. You listen to the changes in sound when growing branches. There are four sliders around the seed’s bulb allow you to influence the sound.

Tuning allows you to adjust the pitch of the entire plant, up to one octave up or down and Atonality determines the type of sounds the plant will produce: musical and “playable” sounds, or atonal sound effect type sounds. The Effect slider adjusts the effect mix and panning amount, while the Release slider controls the time it takes for the sound to fade out after releasing keys.

All of these except Tuning will preserve their settings when creating a new random seed, so you can influence the general type of sound a new seed will generate.

Clicky, clicky, clicky… now where’s the sound I’m looking for?

With the above-mentioned controls you can get some great sounds, but you may still have a hard time getting the exact sound you’re looking for. Now perhaps Synplant isn’t exactly the right synth for you if you want program your sounds rather than “finding” and tweaking them, but there’s more to this instrument than meets the eye.

The little DNA-type button in the top of the interface opens the Gene Manipulation window. Here’s where you can get your hands dirty and do some genetic manipulation on any of Synplant’s 37 genes. You’ll find some control look like regular like synth parameters (i.e. a_mod, lfo_rate and flt_freq), but these aren’t always what they seem to be…

Please be aware that although you may find some of them similar to the controls commonly found in other synthesizers, Synplant genes should not be confused with traditional synthesizer parameters. Many genes have a fairly complex relationship with each other and their scales and response ranges have been extensively tuned so that useful sounds can be created out of random “mutations”.

The Synplant manual comes with a complete list of descriptions of each gene so you know exactly what you’re doing when adjusting these parameters.

Though I don’t think you’ll want to create patches from scratch in the Gene Manipulation dialog much, it’s good to know that you can fine-tune the seed. Note that the branches of a seed could still sound totally different as the seed you’re editing, because they mutate and differentiate from the seed and you can’t control those changes.

Other bits and pieces
There is more to Synplant (the mod wheel ring & wheel scaling, MIDI options, undo/redo, patch manipulation etc.) but I’ll leave those things for you to figure out yourself. The Synplant demo version has a very generous 3 week trial period in which the plug-in is fully functional so there’s plenty of time to explore all of its features.

Synplant comes with a wide variety of patches, showcasing its capable of much more than the experimental sounds you might expect from a synth that grows sounds from seeds.

So what do I think?

It’s not like I haven’t used any synths with great randomize features before, but Synplant is a breath of fresh air. I love its simple interface, the sound manipulation is focused on listening to where you’re taking something rather than programming it, yet Synplant still retains a good level of tweakability in its controls & genes. Oh, and it’s tons of fun to play with.

Although perfectly capable of doing a wide variety of bread & butter type sounds, Synplant is probably most useful for those other kind of sounds. Its wonderfully unique and inspiring sounds become the center of a new piece of music in no time.

Synplant is available for Windows and Mac and costs $89 USD, which I think is a great price. You can check the Synplant product page for some audio demos, or try the demo version of Synplant here.

I don’t usually rate anything here, but if I would have to this easily gets a 5/5 score.

More information: Sonic Charge / Synplant

Some interesting things I bookmarked on del.icio.us on April 11th, 2008:

# Brockenspiel in action – Brock Craft's Brockenspiel reads the magnetic strip on credit cards and swipe access cards, zips them through an Arduino board and triggers solenoids which bash the chimes.

Left: working on the Arduino, right: the actual Brockenspiel

# pe lang + zimoun : untitled sound objects – The “Untitled Sound Objects” by Pe Lang and Zimoun creates acoustic architecture from organic objects and forms connected up to motors and gears. The duo began as laptop performers but were offput by the lack of physicality so they investigated how to create physical instruments that react to their immediate environment and each other.

# Black Flag Hair: A Timeline – Nice illustration of Black Flag's hairstyles from 1976 to 1986.

# little-scale: Arduino Beats – Sebastian Tomczak is working on a sample-based drum machine for the Arduino. At the moment, bars and patterns have to be programmed into the code manually, but he's looking to adding a small and simple physical interface for real-time pattern sequencing.

# Ten Thousand Cents – Behind the scenes of a mechanical turk project: 10,000 people drawing a small piece of a 100 dollar bill.

Some interesting things I bookmarked on del.icio.us on November 19th, 2007:

• Anton Corbijn Talks Ian Curtis – Interview with Anton Corbijn, director of Joy Division biopic Control.

Anton Corbijn (photo by Carmen Valino)

• Lost in the Static – Lost in the Static is a simple little game that uses some surprising aspects of the human perceptual system to create a visible world out of animating static.
• Foamee – Foamee is a free service that helps track who you owe beers to (and vice-versa) using the popular messaging service, Twitter.
• CJO – Abstract – Organic agriculture and the global food supply – According to researchers at the University of Michigan, organic farms can produce more than enough food to support the world’s population without converting any additional land to crop production.
• pantone autumn – Chris Glass collected leaves from a single maple tree to create this pantone autumn image.