For those who follow my YouTube videos as of late, I’m excited to announce my new ‘Macro‘ sound preset pack, ‘Hyper Birds’! I am very pleased to sell my first preset pack on my website. For those that are new, these are a collection of Native Instruments Absynth 5 bird sound presets. With a variety of customizable parameters, each of the 6 bird sounds can be further enhanced depending on media application - to suit the dynamic movie scene or game environment.
Notably, I have received a lot of requests for bird sounds and demos. Here I will outline why I created these and what the journey has been like.
What are they?
The presets are fundamentally based on 6 bird sound effect types: Pigeon, Canary, Tawney Owl, Bell Bird, Cuckoo and Eastern Whip Bird.
Each of these are well known and tend to be iconic bird sounds. With Absynth 5’s Macro controls, I made these sounds to be customizable to the extent of hyper real sounds; I.e. realistic sounding, and with the possibility for extensive creative input. The Macro’s also function as more than just a range of realistic combinations. They can be automated for unique time-based results.
Example Hyper Birds Whip Bird Preset with Macro Controls settings
The idea brought to life
I was interested in creating each bird sound based on a well known sound. With some background knowlege of procedual audio, the sound design process became a combination of physical modelling synthesis and some sense of 'generative' sound.
The audience for this project was only partially understood: sound designers working in the videogame industry will likely benefit the most, and other creatives creating sound-art for live spaces. Most sound designers could use these presets with ease.
To build the sounds, the main synth oscillator is a wavetable, which is partly made via additive synthesis, within the hybrid semi-modular structure. I created the source sound by studying various professional recordings, including my own.
Example Spectrogram - Eastern Whip Bird (own recording)
Example Spectrogram - Hyper Birds Whip Bird preset. Additional harmonics were implemented.
Some relevant sound libraries that include bioacoustic audio recordings are Avisoft Bioacoustics and the Macaulay Library. Wild Ambience by sound recordist Marc Anderson also feature many characteristic songbirds from Australia and around the world.
After researching audio recordings, I took note of arbitrary variables estimated what 'parametrization' was suitable to simulate them. Finally, automation and MIDI performance is determined by the sound designer.
Whip Bird - this was an envelope driven sound, with envelope pitch and duration Macros.
Canary - based on the 'tweet envelope XY pad' videos, I improved the envelope smoothness by using custom LFOs. This allows for higher tweet rate and accuracy, which lead to a versatile and rapidfire sound!
Pigeon - many similar pigeon sounds can be achieved. The main challenge was creating the timbre and the type of muffled bird vocalizations.
Cuckoo - a simple cuckoo tweet loop, featuring a metallic clock chime sound.
Tawny Owl - an owl ‘twoo’ sound with pitch envelope options.
Bell Bird - a bright single chirp tweet sound, with ability to create a granular soundscape.
The results are mostly quite good and realistic sounds. Absynth 5 allows the user to program precise spectral sounds with additive wavetables. The envelope patterns can also be tweaked as a very accurate simulation. There are few synthesizers with versatile envelopes to the nearest millisecond! With the aid of Macro automation, many more sound variations are possible, such as those for ‘Wren’ video tutorials.
Both Pigeon and Canary patches offer the most parameters to explore. The Pigeon can generate a large range of different timbres and characteristics, whereas the Canary's strength is in the time-based pattern automation.
A detailed PDF manual is also provided with the main presets to describe the patches with each of the Macro controls.
Limitations
A downside I encountered was oscillator aliasing, which occurs when using steep pitch envelopes with upper partials. Most of the bird sound patterns were optimized by testing the parameter extremes and careful use of filters.
I also was limited by time, and could only create the fundamental bird patterns, which were simplified. It would have been interesting to explore more uncommon song patterns and other sound variations from the same bird species.
Reception
I have received great feedback, especially from YouTube viewers for the sound design. I’m also very thankful to be making some sales.
Other birds requested include the Australian Kookaburra and Magpie, although these will require a lot more research and experimentation due to their complex timbre characteristics.
I also wanted to include the iconic Blackbird - I first heard these beautiful bird songs from the early days of MAGIX Music Maker software. This was from nearly 2 decades ago! MAGIX provide royalty free loops that often include a sound effects catagory.
If any additions in future though, these would also have to be made with a different synth.
I started this project sometime around 2023, although during this time unfortunately Absynth 5 become discontinued by Native Instruments.
If you’ve used these presets - please feel free to share your work or leave a comment here!
Or, if you would like to purchase, please head to the store by clicking here.