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Bioscape - A Sonic Kaleidoscope of Found Sound Cinematics

Luftrum

Luftrum

Active Member
Bioscape-background.jpg


Dear VI Control friends.

I am proud to announce the release of Bioscape where field recordings merge together in a sonic kaleidoscope of found sound cinematics – from underscoring pads to drones, pulses and textures.

Bioscape is a 4.5GB Kontakt instrument that is based on field recordings and found sounds to create musical content, particularly suitable for game and filmscore composers but works extremely well with ambient music, music concréte, sound healing, music therapy or as a standalone experimental instrument.

Below is a short 2-minute intro teaser on YouTube, there's a link to the full length 30-minute vid at the end of the teaser.



Bioscape contains hundreds of field recordings and found sounds from hydrophonic desert wind to abandoned factory drones, from ghostly ringing rocks to cracking icy rivers, all sorted in different sound categories. Using the sound material, a team of excellent sound designers have crafted over 320 presets sorted in categories from pulses to pads, textures, ASMR, drones, playables and effects.

Bioscape is an official Native Instruments third party library, made for the free Kontakt Player so you do not need the full version of Kontakt to play Bioscape. It is fully NKS compatible and supports drag & drop, so you can use your own sounds and samples. It is installed directly in Native Access, just enter the serial number and click install.

Bioscape supports drag & drop, so you can use your own field recordings and samples

draganddrop5.gif


Just drag & drop a sample to the waveform display. You can drag & drop single samples but not multi-samples. If there are loop points in the wave file, it will load the loop too. User samples will automatically be mapped to root note C3 and located in the ‘User’ category.

Within the DNA of Bioscape is a multifaceted instrument that on one side can sound as atonal and dark as you want and on the other side produce the most ethereal and light timbres. It contains presets by sound designers such as Arksun, Simon Stockhausen, Claus Gahrn, Adam Pietruszko, Empty Vessel, Luftrum, Sonic Underworld, Echo Season and Triple Spiral Audio.

One of the key features in Bioscape is the recording automation – a creative tool where you can record motion to shape the character of the sound over time. With this, you can create organic and dynamic movement to the cutoff, volume, pitch, panning and effects, from slow motion to fast and drastic changes.

The recording automation, a creative tool to shape the character of the sound over time...


recordingmotion3.gif


Bioscape is our biggest, longest running, most complex and mind-bending project in the history of Luftrum. With two years in the making, over 14000 lines of code and 30 people involved in the creation, from world-class field recordists to graphic designers, programmers and a team of excellent sound designers, we are proud to finally set it free from the sound lab.

Check out the playlist below, with demo tracks by a variety of amazing composers, showing the many sides of Bioscape from dark cinematic to light ambient. More info to be found on the Bioscape page.

Luftrum, over and out...









Click to read more...
 
Last edited:
this looks and sounds like absolutely amazing. Nice to see someone trying to reach for a unique character.
 
Another fine release from Luftrum following from the success of Lunaris, which begs me to ask the question, are there any crossgrade discounts available for owners of Lunaris at all?

Luftrum said:
Bioscape-background.jpg


Dear VI Control friends.

I am proud to announce the release of Bioscape where field recordings merge together in a sonic kaleidoscope of found sound cinematics – from underscoring pads to drones, pulses and textures.

Bioscape is a 4.5GB Kontakt instrument that is based on field recordings and found sounds to create musical content, particularly suitable for game and filmscore composers but works extremely well with ambient music, music concréte, sound healing, music therapy or as a standalone experimental instrument.

Below is a short 2-minute intro teaser on YouTube, there's a link to the full length 30-minute vid at the end of the teaser.



Bioscape contains hundreds of field recordings and found sounds from hydrophonic desert wind to abandoned factory drones, from ghostly ringing rocks to cracking icy rivers, all sorted in different sound categories. Using the sound material, a team of excellent sound designers have crafted over 320 presets sorted in categories from pulses to pads, textures, ASMR, drones, playables and effects.

Bioscape is an official Native Instruments third party library, made for the free Kontakt Player so you do not need the full version of Kontakt to play Bioscape. It is fully NKS compatible and supports drag & drop, so you can use your own sounds and samples. It is installed directly in Native Access, just enter the serial number and click install.

Bioscape supports drag & drop, so you can use your own field recordings and samples

draganddrop5.gif


Just drag & drop a sample to the waveform display. You can drag & drop single samples but not multi-samples. If there are loop points in the wave file, it will load the loop too. User samples will automatically be mapped to root note C3 and located in the ‘User’ category.

Within the DNA of Bioscape is a multifaceted instrument that on one side can sound as atonal and dark as you want and on the other side produce the most ethereal and light timbres. It contains presets by sound designers such as Arksun, Simon Stockhausen, Claus Gahrn, Adam Pietruszko, Empty Vessel, Luftrum, Sonic Underworld, Echo Season and Triple Spiral Audio.

One of the key features in Bioscape is the recording automation – a creative tool where you can record motion to shape the character of the sound over time. With this, you can create organic and dynamic movement to the cutoff, volume, pitch, panning and effects, from slow motion to fast and drastic changes.

The recording automation, a creative tool to shape the character of the sound over time...


recordingmotion3.gif


Bioscape is our biggest, longest running, most complex and mind-bending project in the history of Luftrum. With two years in the making, over 14000 lines of code and 30 people involved in the creation, from world-class field recordists to graphic designers, programmers and a team of excellent sound designers, we are proud to finally set it free from the sound lab.

Check out the playlist below, with demo tracks by a variety of amazing composers, showing the many sides of Bioscape from dark cinematic to light ambient. More info to be found on the Bioscape page.

Luftrum, over and out...







Click to expand...
 
Ndee said:
this looks and sounds like absolutely amazing. Nice to see someone trying to reach for a unique character.
Click to expand...
Thank you so much. I hope the outcome reflects the time and nurturing that went into the creation process.
mr.vad0614 said:
Another fine release from Luftrum following from the success of Lunaris, which begs me to ask the question, are there any crossgrade discounts available for owners of Lunaris at all?
Click to expand...
There's not a dedicated crossgrade offer, but I have an exclusive 20% newsletter subscriber discount, so if you are on the mailing list you already got a discount code in your inbox. Otherwise you can subscribe and receive a 20% discount code too. That's the best discount at the moment.
 
I had only short time to test this one out but I am really impressed so far :2thumbs:.

Far away from getting into the details (have not even touched the modulation and effects pages) but the snapshots gives you a good idea of what the library is capable of.

And with the recordable modulation on the main page (6 quick modulation sliders and the x/y pad for the soundsources) I am more then busy for now :).

Not to forget the two Mutate buttons which are really unique and gives you the option to completely change the sound character of evry snapshot, that opens really impressive and weird soundscaping options.

A really good (20 pages) manual and the longer walkthrough video gets you well started.

I am mostly into real ambient kind of presets and so far have only tested the texture snapshots which gives you more then enough in this direction.

Some more annotations: on first try for me it is much more intuitivly useable then Lunaris, separating the soundsources in two pages A and B really brings evrything to start on the main page (only thing: I should not forget about that there two more soundsources on the other page ;)).

I was unsure how much it will overlapp with the two soniccouture libraries in the same direction I already have (Haunted spaces, Geosonics), especially as the central concept overlapps a lot with Haunted spaces, but the sounds are totally different, kind of "inbetween" the two in a way (geosonic with target on "real" ambiences and haunted spaces on processed ones), and really serving my needs of "ambient" very, very well.

And not to forget: I can use it (on one track at least, and thats all thats needed for me) without problems on my old notebook with 8 GB Ram, that is kind of impossible with Lunaris.
 
A little question: I was happy being able using it while I am on the road with my old notebook on the weekends and now while trying to play around a little bit with it to just adjust some snapshots to my liking I just doubled the cpu use by changing the second mutate button from "cell" to "earth" (so that I get "Ambient earth", which really sounds nice), could that be ?

With "Ambient athmosphere" the cpu goes down again but it just does not sound that impressive then with "earth" for that patch :sad:. Apart from that I only exchanged some samples but that does not seem to have lots of influence on the cpu. Then it would be good to know a little bit more about whats going on in the background with theses mutate buttons.
 
KarlHeinz said:
Then it would be good to know a little bit more about whats going on in the background with theses mutate buttons.
Click to expand...
Hello KarlHeinz. First of all, thank you so much for the mini review you did above. I am glad to read that you enjoy the sound of Bioscape. The Mutate function in the center of the user interface create various mutations of the sounds. With this, you can transform existing presets using two distinctive DNA types. The outcome of the transformation range from subtle to wild.

mutategif.gif


The upper part of Mutate makes changes to the Main tab such as envelopes, filter types, cutoff value, playback modes etc. while the lower part is making changes to the stuff going on in the Mod and Effects tab such as changing LFO rates, turning effects on / off, setting a specific sequence pattern, setting specific reverb value etc. and some of those settings might be a bit CPU demanding, for instance the lower setting Earth you are referring to does this:

Mod tab: Set SEQ2 to 1/8, Set LFO1 to 0.10Hz, LFO2 to 0.15Hz turn sync OFF
Effects tab: AB Replika Delay ON type Diffusion, CD Replika Delay On, Type Tape

I promise I will add all the different settings to the PDF manual at some point, so those interested in the settings can take a deeper look "behind the scenes".
 
Thanks a lot for the explanation :) .

Thats good to know that there are completely different targets with the two mutant buttons.

So maybe just turning on the two replikas (in context with the other modulators) was enough for that cpu increase on my old notebook (which is by no way a scale to mesure a library in 2020 :) ).

As with Lunaris (and maybe even more cause its really more intuitive for me) what I already love is how easy it is two adept the snapshot settings for making your own patches with just exchanging some sounds and playing around with the modulation options.
 
Yes, the Replika delay is somewhat CPU consuming and having two of them activated at the same time might cause a bit of stuggles for older machines. The Replika delay is actually based on the Replika XT delay plugin by Native Instruments and it's a huuuge upgrade compared to the legacy Kontakt delay. Replika has five different delay algorithms from Tape to Analogue, Vintage, Modern and Diffusion, the latter is a reverb-sounding delay - perfect for big ambient washes.

I think that having 2 x Replika delays working in pair for both the dual layers in Bioscape is a world of infinite creativity, for just the delay effect alone.
 
Thanks a lot for the manual update :2thumbs:

This is really great getting to know a little bit more about whats going on in the background and in which direction it might make sense to go.
 
Wait...., maybe I just haven't been keeping up with all the latest libraries, but I've NEVER seen the ability to drag 'n drop your own sample on the Kontakt interface like this. This is HUGE!!!

Out of curiosity, what happens with that audio file? Does Kontakt reference it in its original location or does the sample get copied to a new directory?

And yeah, just to echo the above statements, this library sounds and looks fantastic!!!
 
benmrx said:
Wait...., maybe I just haven't been keeping up with all the latest libraries, but I've NEVER seen the ability to drag 'n drop your own sample on the Kontakt interface like this. This is HUGE!!!

Out of curiosity, what happens with that audio file? Does Kontakt reference it in its original location or does the sample get copied to a new directory?

And yeah, just to echo the above statements, this library sounds and looks fantastic!!!
Click to expand...
Thanks! Yes, the drag & drop feature was implemented in Kontakt v6.2 so it's still a fairly new feature but probably the most requested Kontakt feature of them all. It opens up a world of options for sample libraries and it makes the whole difference, to be able to import and use your own samples.

Kontakt references the samples from the user directory. It will not create a copy of the sample to any location. User samples are mapped to root note C3 and can be accessed from the 'User' category in Bioscape.

Development fact: Drag & drop was not integrated in the first final version of Bioscape. It simply wasn't in Kontakt at that time. And I was looking into all sorts of ways and workarounds to import and make user samples work with Bioscape - but it just wasn't doable, no matter what we did.

So... around the time when Bioscape was almost completed and only the final details were being adjusted, then NI introduced this long awaited drag & drop feature, which was crucial to have in a library as Bioscape. I asked the scripter, because everything in Bioscape is closely tied together and integrating drag & drop in a completed instrument is far more complex in comparison to have it integrated from the start, but he made it work in the end. It delayed the whole release a bit, but I wouldn't launch Bioscape without.
 
Seems like a nicely crafted instrument. I'm bringing a couple of questions here from that thread over in the Sample Talk forum. Thanks for the response and pointer to the video of how to program in movement. My further questions:

1) I assume stereo samples are supported, but just wanted to double-check.

2) Is there any use of Kontakt's granular functions here (like Time/Tone machines)? Or is that a "open the wrench" kind of thing?

3) Can the root key of samples (either native or imported) be changed so they play back at different intervals relative to each other? Or is that only done with the tune knob? And in fact, is changing the tune knob to an octave up any different than changing the root key to be an octave lower?

4) Regarding the x/y path... can one draw that path, then add some random "variation" around the current path point at any given time? So that the patch kind of "meanders" roughly along a programmed path, but with some variation? A "meander" parameter, as it were?

5) I wasn't 100% clear on what you meant (in the Sample Talk) thread when you said " You can randomize the sequencers and LFO's by using the 'randomize' button"... is that just a random initial value, or...? Is there no "random" or "sample/hold" waveform available on the LFOs?

6) How much of the motions can be written into a DAW (Cubase in my case)? For instance, if I wanted to create some A/B/C/D mix movement that coincided with specific timeline events in cubase (either by beat or by time), can that movement be drawn into the automation? and if so, how does that work for an x/y controller? Does that translate to two controller lanes -- one for the X axis and one for the Y axis?

Thanks much!
 
glittle said:
Seems like a nicely crafted instrument. I'm bringing a couple of questions here from that thread over in the Sample Talk forum. Thanks for the response and pointer to the video of how to program in movement. My further questions:

1) I assume stereo samples are supported, but just wanted to double-check.
Click to expand...
Thank you. Yes, stereo samples are supported, although it only displays as a single waveform in the display window when imported via drag & drop.

glittle said:
2) Is there any use of Kontakt's granular functions here (like Time/Tone machines)? Or is that a "open the wrench" kind of thing?
Click to expand...
Bioscape isn't using any granular functions to play the samples. It uses the Time Machine feature to timestretch samples via the effects tab.

glittle said:
3) Can the root key of samples (either native or imported) be changed so they play back at different intervals relative to each other? Or is that only done with the tune knob? And in fact, is changing the tune knob to an octave up any different than changing the root key to be an octave lower?
Click to expand...
The root key is set to C3 for all imported user samples per default and cannot be changed. You can tune the samples using the Tune knob, this alters the sample playback but it's a destructive process and different from transposing it. In most cases though, using the Tune knob to notch samples a few semi-tones would be okay and likely hardly noticeable.

glittle said:
4) Regarding the x/y path... can one draw that path, then add some random "variation" around the current path point at any given time? So that the patch kind of "meanders" roughly along a programmed path, but with some variation? A "meander" parameter, as it were?
Click to expand...
No, sorry.

glittle said:
5) I wasn't 100% clear on what you meant (in the Sample Talk) thread when you said " You can randomize the sequencers and LFO's by using the 'randomize' button"... is that just a random initial value, or...? Is there no "random" or "sample/hold" waveform available on the LFOs?
Click to expand...
Using the Randomize button in the modulation tab will set all LFO's and sequencers to random values and rates. There is no S/H values for the LFO's.

glittle said:
6) How much of the motions can be written into a DAW (Cubase in my case)? For instance, if I wanted to create some A/B/C/D mix movement that coincided with specific timeline events in cubase (either by beat or by time), can that movement be drawn into the automation? and if so, how does that work for an x/y controller? Does that translate to two controller lanes -- one for the X axis and one for the Y axis?
Click to expand...
The movement of the faders for the Quick Mod and Quick FX controls can be assigned to MIDI CC and automated via your DAW, you can right-click these faders and choose Learn MIDI CC# Automation you can do that with most knobs and faders in Kontakt in general, same can be achieved via the Automation tab in Kontakt browser.

The X/Y pad on the other hand, is limited to the motion you draw and cannot be assigned to MIDI CC values, not at this point at least, it is possible to integrate but it would require the change to be scripted into the feature before it can be used.
 
glittle said:
6) How much of the motions can be written into a DAW (Cubase in my case)? For instance, if I wanted to create some A/B/C/D mix movement that coincided with specific timeline events in cubase (either by beat or by time), can that movement be drawn into the automation? and if so, how does that work for an x/y controller? Does that translate to two controller lanes -- one for the X axis and one for the Y axis?
Click to expand...

Regarding the XY pad, while there isn't a specific MIDI CC implementantion, DAW automation can be done with Kontakt's host automation feature:

- "Mix Pad X" and "Mix Pad Y" (the first two automation parameters).

Yes, you need to write to 2 lanes, one for each axis.

Please make sure you turn off the play/record buttons for the mix pad when writing host automation data, otherwise they will interfere with each other.

Paulo
 
I decided to create this demo to thank Luftrum for years of fabulous sound creations and for being a great chess opponent.



Bioscape allowed me to create organic sounds that really inspired me into this dreamy track, I hope you like it.

Patches used (all from Luftrum BioScape):
Keys: Atom Electro Watts LUF
Pulse: A Soft Cluster Wind LUF
Rain: Rain sound from Bioscape, no effects except a bit of reverb.
BioCello: Custom made patch out of the "Bowed Diddley Bow" Recording
Final Distortion sound: Hardangervidda TSA

non Bioscape sounds:
Cinesamples Tina Guo Cello
Final seconds of the song has a very soft Sine Wave near the end to increase perceived fundamental sound.
 
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