A playable vocal instrument built from one of humanity’s earliest sound recordings: a scale sung by the inventor of phonautography more than 160 years ago.

Phonautography was invented in the early 1850s by French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville: a horn with a stylus transferred the vibrations of the voice as lines onto soot-blackened paper, and the recordings preserved by the French Academy of Sciences were finally decoded by First Sounds using laser scanning equipment at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Soundiron spliced and edited Martinville’s own sung scale, “Gamme de la Voix”, into a chromatically playable solo vocal instrument and also warped the material into soundscapes, textures, tonal pads, synths, drones and resynthesised drums. The Kontakt interface offers swell, attack, release, offset, vibrato, filter and pitch controls, an LFO system, an arpeggiator, key and scale lock, plus an effects rack with 18 modules and convolution reverb.

Features

• Chromatically playable “Gamme de la Voix” vocal instrument
• Resynthesised Phonautodrums
• 31 ambience patches created from the source content
• 20 custom FX and ambient presets
• LFO, filter, glide and arpeggiator
• 147 stereo samples as 24-bit/48 kHz WAV

Technical details

• Type: Virtual instrument for Kontakt
• Operating systems: Windows, macOS
• Requirement: Full version of Native Instruments Kontakt 5.5 or higher; Kontakt Player is not sufficient
• Content: 445 MB, 147 stereo samples, 1 Kontakt instrument (.nki), WAV 24-bit / 48 kHz

System requirements

• Mac OS X 10.9 or higher
• Windows 7 or higher
• RAM: 2 GB
• Full version of Native Instruments Kontakt 5.5 or higher; Kontakt Player is not sufficient

The licence is registered with the manufacturer at https://activate.soundiron.com/. You will receive your serial number and the download link by e-mail immediately after purchase.