I keep a mental list of sounds I’ve never been able to properly capture in a sample library. A choir whispering in a dead-silent room — not performing, not projecting — but breathing music into a microphone from centimetres away, is near the top of it. SRM Sounds ASMR Choir, the fifth release from Max Richter’s instrument imprint, might be the closest anyone’s come to bottling that.
What SRM Sounds Is
Back in December 2023, composer Max Richter — known for SLEEP, On the Nature of Daylight and scores for Black Mirror and Ad Astra — launched SRM Sounds in collaboration with Will Evans, former CEO of Spitfire Audio. The premise was deceptively simple: use the extraordinary acoustic environment of Studio Richter Mahr, Richter’s eco-conscious studio built inside a converted farm building in the Oxfordshire countryside, as the basis for a curated series of Kontakt instruments.
The first release, Max Richter Piano, captured his Steinway Model D grand focusing on the softest dynamics — ppp to mf — and received a rare five-star review from Sound On Sound. Subsequent releases expanded into strings (SRM #002), a processed piano based on the SLEEP sessions, and the percussion-driven Valley Forge (#003). ASMR Choir is #005, and it’s arguably the most conceptually distinctive release yet. We’re hoping to get a closer look at the full SRM Sounds catalogue soon — watch this space.
Walkthrough Video
Four Instruments, One Breath
The library is built around a choir specialising in Renaissance music — a deliberate choice. Renaissance choral practice is intimate, text-driven, and fundamentally about blend rather than projection. That ensemble was recorded in Studio Richter Mahr’s main room with close microphones capturing the “tiny” sounds: the breath before a phrase, the soft consonant, the decay that disappears in a hall. Soprano Grace Davidson, who performed as soloist throughout Richter’s eight-and-a-half-hour SLEEP concerts — described by Eric Whitacre as having “one of the most beautiful and pure soprano voices on earth” — is at the heart of the choir instrument.
Alongside the choir, a small string section of solo violin and cello was recorded both independently and together with the choir in the same room. That “in situ” ensemble recording matters: the acoustic relationship between the strings and voices is captured as it happened, not assembled from separate sessions. If you’ve ever tried to blend a dry string library against a roomy choir and failed, you know exactly why this is significant.
The fourth instrument is where Richter’s own aesthetic fully enters the picture. Those choir and string recordings were passed through analogue vocoders — a texture Richter has used repeatedly in his film scoring work — and the results resampled back into the library as a fourth “processed” instrument.
Why This Palette, Why Now?
I can’t help thinking that the timing here is precise. As AI-generated music floods the lower end of the library music market, the human voice — specifically the un-performed human voice, recorded in its most unguarded, low-dynamic state — is becoming a genuinely rare commodity. ASMR Choir isn’t selling loudness or drama. It’s selling intimacy, and that’s harder to fake.
The analogue vocoder processing also anchors the library in something tactile. Perhaps I’m wrong, but there’s a growing fatigue with hyper-clean digital processing chains; the warmth and slight unpredictability of hardware vocoders on acoustic sources gives this library a fingerprint that pure in-the-box processing would struggle to replicate. If you’ve been exploring this kind of intimate vocal territory already — say, through something like Void & Vista’s FOLDS, which we reviewed last year — ASMR Choir occupies a complementary but distinctly different space: less synthesis-driven, more purely acoustic and documentary in spirit.
Contextually, SRM Sounds continues to position itself in a specific lane: not chasing Spitfire’s scale or EastWest’s comprehensiveness, but curating small, deeply considered instrument sets around a single artist’s aesthetic. Five releases in, that identity is crystallising. Each library has pushed the low-dynamic, intimate approach — and with ASMR Choir, they’ve found perhaps the most natural vehicle for it.
What You Actually Get
The library ships as four instruments totalling approximately 24.6GB:
- Choir — Renaissance vocal ensemble, close-mic’d, low dynamic focus
- Strings — Solo violin and cello, recorded independently
- Choir + Strings — Ensemble performance captured together in situ
- Processed — Analogue vocoder treatments derived from the above sources
All four instruments include three mic mixes, an ADSR envelope, and built-in effects. The library runs in Kontakt Player (version 7.10 or higher required) and is NKS compatible.
Pricing and Availability
SRM Sounds ASMR Choir is available now, with an intro price of £149 until May 31st, 2026, rising to the standard price of £199 thereafter.
Full details and purchase at the official product page: srmsounds.com/products/asmr-choir
