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Free Native Instruments plugin enables you conduct a choir of 1,000s of Jacob Collier fans “polyphonically across many different chords, keys and soundworlds”

Enter Jacob Collier Audience Choir, an awe-inspiring, free instrument from award-winning multi-instrumentalist and Native Instrument Artist Board member Jacob Collier. Created using audience recordings from Jacob’s Djesse world tour (Djesse Vol. 4 out now!), this instrument allows you to harness the emotive power of a huge choir, and sculpt it in exciting ways.

The new free plugin captures the sound of Collier’s audience choir in a software instrument. The audience choir is a regular feature of Collier’s live shows where the Grammy-winning artist invites his audience to participate in the performance of his songs, conducting them “polyphonically across many different chords, keys and soundworlds”.

Jacob Collier Audience Choir is built on recordings of 22 concerts in different cities around the world, from Adelaide to Zurich; as notes are played, you’ll be able to see which recordings you’re hearing on the plugin’s interface. The plugin offers four different vowel sounds (Aa, Mm, Oo, and Ee) which can be blended via the XY pad on the interface’s right-hand side.

The instrument also features a chord generator, so you’ll be able to play diatonic chords with single notes, and a slider for dynamics control. A timbre knob acts like a low-pass filter, and the onboard delay and reverb do exactly what you’d expect them to do, with five reverb types onboard. You’ve also got a control for stereo width, and you’ll be able to shape your envelope with dials for attack and release.

Open up a separate panel and you’ll find more advanced controls that allow you to automatically tune the chords you’re playing to the just intonation tuning system in real-time. “One of the most amazing things about audience choirs is that people often automatically tune to each other in just intonation, because the way the piano is tuned doesn’t usually apply to groups of singers en masse”, Collier says. “It’s kind of an amazing part of this plugin that it’s able to adapt as people would in real rooms to be very much in tune.”

In addition to the choir sounds, the plugin’s equipped with percussive sounds and a number of other samples of Collier’s audience shouting various words and phrases. The plugin supports polyphonic aftertouch, so you’ll be able to get expressive with MPE-compatible controllers like the Native Instruments Kontrol S MK3.

“I’ve spent the last few years touring around the world, playing shows in every corner of the globe […] one of my favourite parts of the whole experience has been the ever-expanding evolution of the audience choir”, Collier says in the video embedded above.

“Over the course of this experience, one thing I was dreaming about was: what if I could sit in the comfort of my own home, and you could sit in the comfort of your own home, and experience the feeling of an audience choir at your fingertips? So I teamed up with the mighty Native Instruments gang and we put together this amazing instrument, built from real samples of real audiences the world over”.

Download Jacob Collier Audience Choir now at Native Instruments website.

Analoguesque Sound Designs sound designer Ian Wilson let us know that he has released 3 free sound banks of 128 patches for the ASM Hydrasynth.

What he shared about the three sound banks:

Bank 1 is “Analoguesque Bread & Butter I”, which contains 128 presets covering analog blips and bleeps, FM sounds, large basses, and a host of presets that will be familiar to lovers of 80s synth hits. How about Daft Punk’s “Da Funk” lead or Duran Duran’s “Save a Prayer” sequence. Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough” or “Nodisco” leads anyone? The jewel is a synthesized version of the famed Fairlight ARR1 preset, which is uncannily close to the original. This sound is used prevalently in 80s hits from bands like The Cars, Tears for Fears, Yazoo, Duran Duran, and The Art of Noise, to name a few. There are also drum and percussion sounds that can be tweaked with the macro knobs to provide fun alternatives. On that note, many of the presets can be tweaked subtly or even drastically using the macro knobs, expanding the sonic palette beyond 384 presets.

“Analoguesque Bread & Butter II” continues in a similar vein to I, with another 128 presets covering large basses, leads and pads. Plenty of timbral ground is covered by these presets, showcasing the sonic tip-of-the-iceberg potential of the ASM Hydrasynth.

“Analoguesque Esoteric I” is the 3rd bank that is a little more “out there”. Lots of atmospheric pads and very large sounding presets in general, that should fill gaps in any genre of music.

The three soundbanks for the ASM Hydrasynth are available now as free downloads.

Audacity recently received a new plugin suite powered by Intel’s OpenVINO AI toolkit. Intel-powered OpenVINO processors are designed to “offer capabilities that were previously unavailable or just really difficult to achieve”

This free and open-source software offers stem separation, transcription, and generating new music from a text prompt or an existing audio track.

First up, we have Music Generation and Music Style remix, both of which use the Stable Diffusion AI model – specifically in its Riffusion guise – to create either new music from a prompt, or existing music.

Music Separation does what it says: breaks a song up into either vocal or instrumental parts, or into vocal, drums, bass and a combined ‘anything else’ part.

Stem Separation is a feature that is becoming more and more commonplace; not only does it form the basis of a number of desktop and browser-based applications, but it’s also being included in an increasing number of DAWs and other music production packages.

In addition, Audacity gets Noise Suppression, which is designed to remove background noise from an audio file, and Whisper Transcription, a tool for transcribing spoken word audio or vocal recordings.

“We decided to add AI features to Audacity so that we could offer capabilities that were previously unavailable or just really difficult to achieve,” says Audacity Product Manager Martin Keary in a video posted by Intel Business. He also confirms that “the plugins run locally on your PC rather than from a server, addressing privacy concerns.”

According to Keary, there could be more to come, too: “This is just a first step,” he says. “We hope to continue partnering with Intel to develop all kinds of new AI tools in the future to help take Audacity to a level no one’s ever seen before.”

The AI plugins are currently only available to Windows users, but we’re hoping that they’ll be coming to Mac and Linux, as well. Find out more – including how to download and install them – on the Audacity blog.