Teenage Engineering Choir Featured In Latest Pixar Film, Elio
Teenage Engineering let us know that their Choir – a collection of 8 wooden virtual vocalists that ‘sing’ with synthesized voices – is featured as a vocal ensemble in the soundtrack to the movie, Elio.
Elio is the latest animated film from Pixar, and is about a lonely 11-year old boy that ends up going on adventure in space.
In January 2025, composer Rob Simonsen contacted Teenage Engineering about using their Choir on the soundtrack:
“We were looking for an otherworldly sound—something that sounded relatable, that echoed vocalizations, communication that humans could understand, but felt like it was from another world.
I came across these choir dolls and heard their sound. It was beautiful—electronic, but human. Each body is handcrafted. They have a robotic but organic sound at the same time. It felt like a perfect answer to what we were looking for.”
Teenage Engineering provided 24 choir dolls, and developed new firmware to evenly distribute musical notes across the choir.
Recording took place at the Sony scoring stage in Los Angeles, where the Choir dolls were mic’d similarly to a human choir and recorded in the same acoustic space:
Simonsen used the Choir as part of the sonic identity for The Communiverse, a futuristic interplanetary organization. The Choir is arranged similarly to a traditional choral ensemble, but the results have a distinctive synthesized character.
An example of the Choir in use can be heard in the following track, around 3:25 in:
This is the first time, that Teenage Engineering is aware of, that the Choir has been featured in a major soundtrack.
Information about the Choir is available at the TE site.
