Spectrasonics Symphony of
Voices
Symphony of Voices from Spectrasonics
is an ambitious effort to provide a comprehensive collection of
vocal samples that rise above the usual lifeless Vox pad. In fact,
the four CD-ROMs in this collection are just the first of two
volumes, the second being the three-CD-ROM set called Vocal Planet,
scheduled for release later this fall, and which will contain
vocal samples of the world's music cultures as well as blues,
gospel, and jazz vocals. Perhaps I should characterize Symphony
of Voices as an exhaustive effort instead of merely ambitious:
Not only did Spectrasonics collect thousands upon thousands of
vocal samples, they also programmed and organized them into musically
useful patches (for a hint of what an enormous task this was,
see "Lifting Voices" sidebar).
What
do you get that's so useful? An 80-voice professional church
choir, a male choir singing chant, a boys' choir, and studio
singer pads, all sampled in a variety of dynamics, vowels, and
configurations. From single notes and intervals to chords and
horror movie vocal effects, this collection presents a remarkably
wide palette. Phrase samples abound as well, including entire
multi-verse chants, solo voices in a variety of classical styles,
and liturgical passages for full choir. Since it takes four
CD-ROMs to hold it all, let's open up the church doors on each
disc separately.
THE LONDON CHOIRS
If you've ever worked with a
large choir or listened to one, you know that, with rare exceptions,
part of the sound is often a liberal and possibly indiscriminate
use of vibrato. Now, vibrato is an essential part of a singer's
tone and phrasing, and it definitely has its place in ensembles
as well as solo singing. But where samples are concerned, having
vibrato is almost as limiting as sampling a Hammond organ through
a Leslie: When you play more than one note, the vibrato rates
will be out of sync, and you can never get the vibrato to match
your phrasing.
Which is why Spectrasonics traveled to England,
a musical culture with a long tradition of controlling and even
eliminating vibrato when singing. All of the multisampled oo's,
oh's, ah's, ee's, mm's, and vowel combinations sound clear and
intelligible, whether sung by full choir, or men alone, or women
alone, or whether piano, forte, or with crescendos and decrescendos.
Now, keep in mind that this is an 80-voice choir, but there's
hardly a trace of vibrato in the bunch. Combine this sonic purity
with the beautifully blendable bunch of samples. I found all
of the multisampled patches on this disc to be very musical
when I used them on polyphonic (that is, contrapuntal) material.
The gentle attacks made them less successful when I played in
a block chord style, but there are patches on the other discs
that may help you if you need this kind of sound. The crescendo/decrescendo
patches are quite musical, but unfortunately you can not change
the rate of crescendo or decrescendo, since it is part of the
performance. On the many patches, the mod wheel is assigned
to volume or dynamic crossfades, so you do have a ready-to-go
alternative for controlling dynamics.
On this disc, technical editor Mitch Gallagher
noticed two of the very few audio blemishes to be found anywhere
in this set. "Some of the full-choir samples have an overtone
ringing prominently," he points out, "especially at higher velocities.
It's annoying with single notes; when playing chords it's almost
offensive." While I, too, heard the harmonics, I felt that it
was more in line with the overtones produced when a group of
singers are singing well in tune with each other.
And if you really do need that vibrato texture,
there are two such programs, one with light vibrato, the other
with heavy vibrato. The whistling and staccato patches are great,
too - imagine, 80 people whistling the same pitch! What a cool
sound.
SOLOISTS AND FX
The solo patches on this disc
come in two flavors: soprano and tenor. Both have multisampled
patches with some variety in vowels and dynamics, as well as a
patch in ascending fifths and one with staccato treatment for
the soprano, and some, ah, robust arpeggios and octaves for the
tenor. In contrast to the full choir samples, these have whatever
vibrato the soloists felt like using. The pitch is not always
on the money, but the performances are certainly beautiful, expressive,
and best of all, believable.
The soloists were also asked to sing some
phrases, which are arranged with some ten to 20 per patch, and
categorized by style: Traditional, lamenting, ethereal, serene,
lyrical, triumphant, and operatic are some of the patch descriptions.
These phrases would be the perfect thing to underscore the mood
of a track. Some are nonsense syllables, others have discernible
words, but they are not designed to be pieced together to form
a coherent piece. "I loved the solo soprano lament phrases,"
says Mitch. "Instant emotion and vibe!"
The choir FX are eerie and powerful, and many
patches contain the reversed versions for extra weirdness. They
consist of the glissandi up and down, moaning, whispering, clusters,
and many other effects that you'd expect from composers such
as Karel Husa or Gyorgy Ligeti.
Did I ask for full-choir block chords
earlier? Here they are, arranged chromatically in major, minor,
and suspended versions, with various dynamics, vowels, and registers.
While you won't be able to string these together and expect
decent voice-leading, they have that fabulous resonance and
blend that characterizes the entire collection. The choir gets
a shot at singing phrases as well, original phrases. These would
be perfect for adding that human element to a track or bed.
Mitch cautions however, that "some of the samples (especially
the chords) are so big-sounding, you'll have to be careful how
you use them in a production - they could easily overwhelm
other tracks (a nice problem to have)."
BOYS' CHOIR AND CHANT
The boys' choir patches on this
disc are truly amazing. Multisampled or in phrases, full choir
or solo, that unmistakable haunting quality comes through loud
and clear. As with all of the samples in this set of discs, the
ranges represented are natural; you'll hear very little chipmunking
anywhere. Some of the boys' choir phrases are so beautiful, they
could inspire entire compositions by themselves.
The men-only chant choir has been multisampled
extensively and programmed accordingly. In addition to the now-familiar
plethora of vowels and dynamics, the guys can be heard singing
intervals in the fifths, whole-steps, and half-steps, both ascending
and descending. The chants, complete with all verses, and one
Greek chant. Then there are several patches of shorter chant
phrases, organized by office: Agnus Dei, Gloria, Kyrie, Sanctus,
etc. Holy cow!
POP STACKS
The final disc in Symphony of
Voices consists of multitracked vocal stacks in a studio. While
they don't have that ambient resonant glory of the other three
discs, they're tailor-made for pop tracks. The detail and comprehensive
programming evident on the other three discs applies here as well:
stacks of women alone, men alone, and the two combined have been
sampled singing ah, ee, oo, mm, vv, and zz, as well as on changing
vowels and mixed vowels. I found all of these patches to be very
playable, and laid to tape they sound way better than your average
Vox patch. In fact, when I multitracked different vowels over
the same program material and added crossfades in MOTU's Digital
Performer, I was able to come up with a composite track that sounded
like a live group changing syllables on each note - pretty darn
convincing!
If the chant guys can sing their moving intervals,
then the pop vocals can scoop. Broken out into male and female
versions on a variety of vowels, the scoop patches are remarkably
consistent in the timing of the individual sampled ascending
whole-steps. You can play a five-note chord and be pretty sure
that it'll sound like five singers listening to each other as
they scoop into a chord.
CONCLUSIONS
This is one awesome set of samples.
You couldn't ask for a more thorough or more musical approach.
The sound quality is uniformly excellent, the programming makes
using the samples seem completely natural, and the documentation
is extensive (two 48-page booklets!). You should have no problem
finding what you need on these discs.
What you won't find in this set are scat syllables
(doobees, bops, schwees, other show choir-type syllables), or
jazz articulations (shakes, trills, or fall-offs). Fortunately,
these techniques will be included in the upcoming Vocal Planet
collection.
You may hear occasional artifacts, breaths,
or odd noises in a handful of the samples, due to the nature
of working with a large group of people in a very resonant space
- Mitch noted a bump here and a breath noise there. But what
was not edited out is the human element and the musicality of
the samples.
Mitch summed it up nicely: "Overall, this
set is simply stunning. The selection of material is practical
and useful, the loops and programming are fine, it transposes
well, and the natural church ambiance on many of the samples
is luscious. For classical-flavored music, film scoring, or
commercial music utilizing voice parts, I see Symphony of Voices
as a must-have tool."
Symphony of Voices is without a doubt the
ultimate library of choral samples. If you want to make those
sounds you need this set.
-Ernie Rideout
LIFTING VOICES (sidebar)
- Keyboard Magazine
Veteran sound developer Eric Persing knew he
had a Herculean task ahead when he began the sessions that resulted
in Symphony of Voices, and the upcoming Vocal Planet, but the
reality of producing the discs surprised even him.
"Every group had a different way of communicating,
which we had to learn," Eric relates. "The classical singers in
England could work very precisely for fairly long periods of time,
but they would get tired after they sang a piece. You had to be
careful about having them sing too much music because then their
voices would start to wear out. The kids were incredible. They
were so well-behaved, it was shocking."
"The gospel sessions [the samples from which
will appear on Vocal Planet] were as different as you could
imagine. It was a combination worship service and sampling session
- and it was the most fun session I've ever done in my life! They
were the opposite of the classical choir: They'd get tired doing
the multisampling stuff, and they'd sing more songs to get the
energy back up. When they'd do something cool, we'd stop them,
isolate the part, and roll tape. Nothing was written out. It was
all based on their live energy; all improvised, too."
Most of the classical phrase samples were also
improvised, after a fashion. "It was difficult to find classical
singers who could improvise," Eric continues. "The folks I got
were great. I'd have them sing an aria or classical phrase, then
I'd say, 'Great, now riff on that!'"
Getting the performances out was one challenge,
and getting them on tape was another. "Isolation?" says Eric,
"It was a nightmare. In Seattle, it was raining. The old cathedrals
in England, they creak, they're constantly making noise. In one
of those spaces, a little noise sounds like a bomb. We had seaplanes,
we had the Royal Air Force. The singers would be focused and ready
and then a plane would fly over."
"There were a lot of takes that just had junk
in them. Almost all of the multisamples are spliced from different
takes. We're talking about 10,000 samples we had to go through.
All of the noises and clicks that people make, they're not a big
deal when they go by, but when you loop them, they start to make
a rhythm. All that stuff had to be cut out."
"Roland helped us out with some proprietary
noise reduction software. With it we split it apart the harmonics
of each sample, looped each harmonic independently and applied
noise reduction to them, then recombined them."
No international sampling session would be complete
without major equipment failure. The choirs were recorded with
several mic combinations running to ADAT simultaneously, later
mixing them to two tracks. "We almost lost all of the London samples
because one of the mics was picking up radio transmissions that
we couldn't here when monitoring," he says. "But there was Radio
Free Europe, going to tape. Luckily, it was one of the direct
mics, not the ambient mics, so we only lost the one track. If
it had been one of the ambient mics, we would've lost the session."
Ultimately, then, how many artists were involved
with the recordings? "Between the two projects," says Eric, "we
worked with over 500 singers - and we have contacts with each
one of them."
SYMPHONY OF VOICES Sound on
Sound (UK) review APRIL '98
5 STARS
Symphony of Voices, available in Akai, Roland,
Kurzweil and SampleCell CD-ROM formats, is the latest masterwork
from Spectrasonics‚ Eric Persing, but in this instance, Eric
the eccentric has (temporarily at any rate), given way to Eric
the Meticulous. SOV, essentially a collection of both ensemble
and solo voice samples, comes as a five disc set with the forthcoming
Vocal Planet set to augment it in the not too distant future.
Vocal Planet will include world, dance, jazz, R&B and gospel
material.
The greater part of the SOV collection was recorded
on location with leading choirs around the world, and the treats
on offer include male, female, mixed and boys choirs along with
Gregorian chanting, classical vocal solos and layered pop stacks.
Venues range from Haileybury cathedral in London to the Eastside
Foursquare Church in Seattle with studio work undertaken at two
Burbank studios. The credits section embraces a number of conductors
and choirmasters as well as several pages of engineering, production
and research credits.
The classical performers and choirs were recorded
at specially commissioned sessions in cathedrals to capture an
authentic ambience, and some insight into the recording techniques
is provided in the sleeve notes. In addition to the usual oohs,
aahs and umms, there are slow swells, Latin phrases, evolving
vowels and vocal effects, such as clusters, murmurs and so on.
There are even sections of choirs singing chords, which sound
rather more natural than constructing your own chords from the
single note samples.
Solo examples embrace classical sopranos, tenors,
choir boys and a number of other useful examples, all recorded
& programmed with the same meticulous precision. Pop Stacks
(found on disc four), combines multitracked versions of individual
performers with multiple singers, and if the sleeve notes are
to be believed, this disc alone started life as 10,000 separate
vocal performances!
OK, so the amount of work that went into this
project was immense, but how does it sound? Not surprisingly,
it sounds very good indeed, and though it is possible to spot
a slight change of timbre at some of the multisample split points,
the samples work perfectly in a performance context and sound
very human indeed, even when covering already familiar single
vowel choral territory. In a creative context, the evolving vowel
sounds work exceptionally well while the Gregorian chants and
hums are also usable in a wide range of musical styles.
The single phrase samples are superbly recorded
and can be combined in different orders, but obviously any single
phrase samples are restricted by their tempo and key (though you
can always process them using a program like Time Bandit). Some
of pop stacks are particularly suitable for New Age or Enya-esque
compositions, but what I can't describe in a review like this
is the sheer breadth of material on this five disc set.
Symphony of Voices might cost a lot of money,
but it is clearly the definitive vocal sampling work, and considering
the enormous amount of effort that went into its creation, I have
to say that it is worth it. I'm also impressed by the thorough
sleeve notes that include a number of practical tips on how to
use the samples. Eric and his team have worked hard for their
five stars and well deserved they are.
-Paul White
Symphony of Voices, Technologica
(UK) - May/June 1998
High end sample symphonies
Sample CDs aren't just handy MIDI resources
for snippet-hungry techno tunesmiths. The higher end examples
of the art of sample compilation are essential products for the
soundtrack producer too. We asked award winning AV artist Amos
Zamorski to take his pick from our selection at Technologica Towers:
I love sample CDs and know all the criticisms.
They stifle creativity, it's Airfix kit music, they make it too
easy, they rob musicians of wages and royalties - all of which
are true. But remember the days before them? Remember when you
had to hang outside music colleges waving fifty pound notes in
front of students, hiring expensive microphones, put up with crap
sounds on synths, put up with drummers and all this for a pitch
for a Frosties advert? In this time of ever decreasing time and
budgets, sample CDs are an invaluable tool.
And in the land of CD-ROMs Spectrasonics "Symphony
of Voices" is a tool an elephant would be proud of. This epic
collection of 5 CDs cover choirs (male and female), classical
soloists, choir, fx, boys, choir, Gregorian men and pop stacks.
Each CDs is broken up into multi-sampled parts of ohs, ahs, mms,
ees, chords etc and sound unbelievably evocative and real.
This is pro quality stuff and as such devours
memory. I would advise about 64mb to give it justice but with
memory still cheap at the moment it's worth it. Some of the choir
FX are out of this world, I really liked the vertigo spins and
the cluster and Ligeti swells. There is also a selection of solo
soprano and tenor phrases which are recorded and sung so excellently
there is no doubt you will be hearing them in many adverts for
many years to come. As you would expect, they are marked with
their key and bpm.
The Gregorian multi-samples and phrases are
what you would expect, if a little unsubtle, but should be extremely
useful in the wake of John Tavener's renewed popularity. Similarly,
the Boys choirs are going to be handy when the season turns festive.
My only slight disappointment was with the pop stacks. They are
excellent at what they do (the stacks being made of individual
voices, wow!) just a bit new age for my taste.
This is a hugely impressive piece of work,
it contains well over 2 gigabytes of samples and with over 500
singers at work. Spectrasonics are to be congratulated on the
time, effort and details they have put into Symphony of Voices.
If you do any kind of soundtrack A.V. or advert work these CDs
are essential. They are going to be as important a tool as the
Peter Siedlaczek classical CDs have become and, as such, the £299
begins to look like peanuts.
SYMPHONY OF VOICES review
in The Mix (UK)
Vocal sample CDs are still quite thin on the
ground, despite the fact that there's a market crying out for
them. Symphony of Voices boasts choirs, classical soloists, Gregorian
chants, and layered pop vocals, all supplied as CD-ROMs. This
was obviously a gargantuan project for Spectrasonics, and their
hard work has certainly paid off.
The first three discs cover what could broadly
be labeled as more classically oriented sounds. However, this
is not to say that they couldn't find a comfortable home in many
styles of commercial pop, (remember Enigma?) and there's loads
of variety within the collection.
Every combination of vocal texture is covered
here, from full choirs to solo boys' voices and everything in
between. The recordings are of the highest quality, yet maintain
a 'live' element that makes them so much more convincing than
their synthesized rivals. Probably the most useable CD for pop
samplists is the Pop Stacks disc, where, for some parts, multiple
overdubs by the same vocalist are used to give a lush, full feel
to the recordings. In other examples, namely the Combination Patches
section, three singer's multisamples are assigned to different
keys, meaning that when you play a chord, each note of the chord
is sung by a different singer. Great idea, and one that offers
a huge amount of versatility.
The well selected singers have great tones of
their own, and when they are judicially combined, some of the
resultant timbres are mind boggling. The sounds on this collection
in themselves make it a difficult one to ignore for samplists
needing natural sounding vocals for their recordings. Combine
that with the intuitive and useful inlay books, including tips
and techniques, and the CD-ROM capability, and Symphony of Voices
becomes an absolute essential sampling tool.
-Nick Serre
