Hyperlight Echoes

“To declare that Earth must be the only planet with life in the universe would be inexcusably bigheaded of us” – Neil deGrass Tyson. The recent phenomenon of legitimate UFO’s and unexplained arial sightings has reinvigorated the age old debate – “Are we alone in this universe”? This question forces us to think about what it means to be human on this small spinning rock floating through space. This sample pack is inspired by this concept that evocative sound design starts with a human or natural source. Producer Charles Van Kirk and composer/vocalist Emily Greene created this pack by asking the question: if we were hired to score an artful science fiction film such as Arrival or Dune, what sort of cinematic music and sound design palette could we create by starting with only the human voice?The duo started by recording their voices in weird spaces: singing through didgeridoos, fans, in strange reverberating rooms, and through other found objects. They combined these sounds with tonal noises from furnaces, motors, and bird sounds sampled on the big island of Hawaii. Each sound has been sampled, stretched, re-amped, performed and re-sampled again, often many times over through Sensory Percussion and different synths before yielding a cold, ominous, eerie, and truly captivating soundscape of cinematic samples. Stretching the bounds of the familiar, these vocal sourced samples retain a undeniable “humanness” while being the ideal inspiration for a sci-fi film score. Use these drones and chords as unsettling beds for dark electronic music or sample the sensory percussion in your next track that needs a bit of extraterrestrial mystery. Give into the cold light from the ominous craft havering above you and let yourself be taken into the beyond.