HOW VESPER TOOK SHAPE
It starts
with a choir.
What if a recorded voice could become the material for an oscillator?
The starting point was the character of a choir: the shape of its vowels, the movement of its singers, the air between its notes.
Vesper’s design extracts a changing spectral envelope from a vocal recording. That envelope describes how the sound’s energy is distributed across frequencies. The instrument uses those shapes to build new pitched tones when you play a note.
Three layers approach the same material differently. Freeze holds a selected spectral shape. Alive adds movement and the slight differences of an ensemble. Explore travels through the changing source. Blend them, tune them separately, then shape the result with filters and effects.
The source behind the research
The documented research atlas was derived from a short section of “Choral Chord with Breaths” by blackbar: a small female choir recorded for a college film. The analysis used a publicly available preview of that recording. It is a source of vocal spectral shapes, rather than a library of individually recorded singers. Final release content is still being curated.