Sounds of tomorrow, Robotic lifeforms by Soundmorph

Soundmorph are a brand new sound design library company formed earlier this year. They’re Based in San Francisco and Montreal, and the members of the team are all over the world. Their sound design chops have featured on video game titles such as the Mass Effect Dynasty, Need for Speed, and various television shows and trailers on HBO, Discovery and the History channel. Their view point for their sound banks are future focussed, and their libraries reflect this – The recently released libraries are based around scifi and tech sound atmospheres.

Two of their libraries, Robotic lifeforms, and Users of Tomorrow are between 2 and 3GB of .wav files based around future sounds. Imagine the Minority Report sound world meets the Transformers movies, and is wrapped up into a neat download package.

These sound libraries are top notch. Pristine recordings, all 24 bit 96K, they sound absolutely delightful. And speaking as a composer, I think they’re really useful sound design elements that sit well in a mix.

Robotic lifeforms

This library is the megatron of robotic sound libraries. Weighing in at a very respectable 4GB, and with over 2,700 sounds to browse, this pack caters for all your robot needs, from massive Transformerlike movements, to minuscule robotic twitches. Great care has been taken to creating sounds that fit the robot genre exceptionally well.

The sections are divided into such as Transform, morphs, mechanism, servos, whooshes, power, footsteps, impacts, vocalizing, and so on. All elements of sound around the movements and actions of robots. So most of the bases of robotic movements should be covered.

To go further, the source sounds are also provided, so you can have a go at synthesizing your own robotic sounds directly from the sources they’ve used. Sources such as drills, cameras, synths, field recordings of industrial machines, servos. Loads of quality material to play around with.

Users of tomorrow

Here’s a demo of users of tomorrow sounds

Almost 2.3 GB of sounds fill this pack that focuses on sound design built around human interaction with machines. A little more subtle than the robotic lifeforms – imagine the bridge of the USS Enterprise. The sounds that you hear there as sulu swipes his fingers across the massive touch screens in front of him – the blips, warbles, beeps and clicks; that’s the kind of world that Users of Tomorrow envisages and fills with delightful sound.

The library is well organized into 16 sections, comprising various equipment that the user of tomorrow may encounter. Computer sounds (confirm, calculations, text), Glitch, static, beeps, alarms, drones and loops. Each of the sections is further subdivided. So for example, the section entitled subtle hi-tech contains subfolders for power down, power up, select, confirm, close, open, denied, and so on. And each of these subfolders has 20 or so sonic variations on the subject. Very useful when you’re looking for a specific sound – the organization enables quick location.

As with the other pack, the sound is pristine. All 1,800 + sounds are 24bit 96K quality here. And they’re all embedded with sound miner metadata, so easily searchable.

Here’s a track I wrote for Alienware, that uses sounds from both libraries:

And another track using the library:

Galactic assistance

As if that wasn’t good enough, included free in the sounds of tomorrow pack is a sound design synth built in Max/MSP, and designed to give you unlimited creations of higher frequency bleeps, bips, buzzes and so forth. It’s a simple affair – as you can see from the following video. However, it is expertly designed, and really gives you good control over the creation of these specific types of sounds. As an addition to this particular sound pack it is very useful – and with a little learning, you’ll be creating excellent sounding sci-fi computer sounds.

It’s actually a combination of 4 synths – a loop-able tone generator with envelope, 2 beep generators, and an FM synth, also with envelope control. There is delay on the FM synth. There are randomize buttons on every synth, so every click creates a completely new glitchy beep sound. Every sound you make can be saved in the presets, and can be triggered by midi. Very useful. It’s a standalone synth created in Max, and as of yet, can’t be integrated directly into DAWs. But it’s a synch just recording the sounds you’ve created, and adding them as audio files.

Conclusion
These sounds really are excellent, and great value. If you’re a sound designer looking for futuristic foley and atmosphere, you should really take a good look at these as useful libraries to have around. I am more composer than sound designer, as the demo track suggests. However, for tech electronica, these sounds are part and parcel of the sound world, and I found them incredibly inspiring to use. Highly recommended!

Price
Robotic lifeforms $199 Sounds of tomorrow $99

…These sound libraries are top notch. Pristine recordings, all 24 bit 96K, they sound absolutely delightful. And speaking as a composer, I think they’re really useful sound design elements that sit well in a mix. …

Product page

PROS

• Pristine sound quality
• very well organized
• creative and inspiring sounds

CONS

• Nope