• Personally created by GRAMMY® Award-winning composer & conductor, Eric Whitacre
• 19-world class singers, captured in the exceptional recording & mixing studios, AIR Studios
• Recombine and layer techniques using Spitfire’s unique Scale Mode & Evo Grid technology
• Push boundaries of the human voice to breathtaking extremes in Spitfire Audio’s eDNA synth engine
• Presets from renowned experimental sound artists Ryan Lott, Clark & Katilyn Aurelia Smith

Pre-Order: October 16th, 2023, 5pm BST

Release: October 26th, 2023, 5pm BST

The acclaimed release of Eric Whitacre Choir from Spitfire Audio five years ago captured the breathtaking range of the most emotive musical instrument – the human voice. Advance to today, and Spitfire Audio releases Eric Whitacre Contrast – a sample library that surpasses the sonic boundaries of traditional choral performance, pushing the human voice to powerful new extremes.

Curated by GRAMMY® Award-winning composer and conductor Eric Whitacre, Eric Whitacre Contrast features all-new performances from 19 world-class singers, captured in AIR Studios, offering 245 contemporary techniques made with remarkable clarity and precision.

Also presented in standard mode and Spitfire Audio’s Evo Grid for instant inspiration, these emotive textures are pushed to breathtaking new extremes in the eDNA synth engine, which enables recombining of these techniques to create inspiring new sounds – while also featuring bespoke presets from three special guest sound artists.

A living, breathing machine of sonic metamorphosis with limitless creative sound design possibilities, for any genre of music, available as a standalone library or as an addition to Eric Whitacre Choir and other Spitfire Audio sample libraries.

“What I love about Contrast is that it feels alive, just letting it evolve under your fingers…it offers this cinematic emotional palette that is different to anything we’ve done before. Suddenly you can create these genuinely interesting emotional worlds.”

 – Eric Whitacre

THE NEW WORLD OF CHORAL EXPRESSION

At the heart of the library are 245 experimental techniques performed by 19 members of the Eric Whitacre Singers (Soprano 5, Alto 5, Tenor 4, Bass 5) recorded with a comprehensive range of mic positions in the stunning acoustics of AIR Studios, home of countless blockbuster scores. Each technique, curated with the awe-inspiring expertise of Eric Whitacre, is presented with two contrasting tones — ‘Light’ and ‘Dark’ — Light created with an open vowel shape, and Dark with a closed vowel shape. This seemingly subtle change creates a completely different tone and timbre. The techniques themselves — aptly named fragments, shards, divergences, murmuring, prisms — have been carefully curated to subtly (and sometimes dramatically) dance and move beneath your fingertips, moving at different intervals and through varying shifts in dynamic, tone, and pitch.

SCALE MODE & EVO GRID TECHNOLOGY

Spitfire Audio’s Scale Mode technology allows music makers to select from any of the seven diatonic modes or build their own scale. From there, it intelligently selects the samples that conform to that scale, split by velocity, developing these intervallic techniques and triggering wider intervals at higher velocities. All techniques can also be recombined and layered in Spitfire Audio’s Evo Grid, mappable across the keyboard in endless combinations, either manually or in pre-made configurations of rich, evolving textures. Click ‘Feeling Lucky’ to randomize these combinations for instant inspiration, breathing new life into your music.

PUSHED TO POWERFUL EXTREMES

The eDNA synth engine moves these stunning choral performances into the electronic sphere to create rich, multi-tonal synth textures that haunt and glisten, offering limitless inspiration for producers, beat makers. sound designers or composers writing their next sci-fi, horror or game score.

Harnessing sophisticated technology and innovative processing techniques, it features 24 warps and 92 synth presets created from the organic material, as well as a huge range of in-built controls and FX for maximum creative control and endless sound design possibilities within the plugin. The synth engine also features bespoke presets from three outstanding guest sound artists — Oscar-nominated composer Ryan Lott (Son Lux), Clark, and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith.

Whether you’re looking for instantly usable sounds straight out of the box or wanting to spend hours getting lost in unique sounds, Eric Whitacre Contrast will deliver exciting, unpredictable colors and textures to your sonic palette.

“The library is something special and I know I’ll make use of it in countless ways. I’m particularly excited about the ways the eDNA engine allowed me to come up with stuff that flirts with the edge of recognition of the raw materials as vocal-based. I feel like this will allow me to imbue non-vocal based textures with an elusive sense of humanity, and also the other way around; explicitly vocal textures can easily drift into abstraction. So fun!”

 — Ryan Lott (Son Lux)

 KEY FEATURES

• 19 singers – five Soprano, five Alto, four Tenor, five Bass – captured at Lyndhurst Hall, AIR Studios
• Three GUIs – Standard, Evo Grid, eDNA synth engine
• 245 techniques
• 92 user presets
• 24 warps
• Three mixes – Small, Medium, Big
• 11 signals – Close, Tree, Outrigger, Mid, Ambient, Gallery, Wide Stereo, Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass
• 61,442 samples
• ~66GB download size

Pre-order/Product page URL: https://www.spitfireaudio.com/eric-whitacre-contrast (will be live when the product is on sale)

AVAILABILITY & PRICING

Pre-order: October 16th, 2023 at 5pm BST

Available: October 26th, 2023 at 5pm BST

Pre-order/Product link: https://www.spitfireaudio.com/eric-whitacre-contrast

RRP: £249 / $299 / 279€

Intro Promo Price: £199 / $239 / 219€

* An exclusive 40% saving for Eric Whitacre Choir customers ends October 26th, 2023, followed by a crossgrade discount of 20% from that date onwards

About Eric Whitacre (https://ericwhitacre.com/)

 The Grammy award-winning composer and conductor has had works programmed worldwide, and his ground-breaking Virtual Choirs have united 100,000 singers from more than 145 countries. To date, the Virtual Choirs have registered over 60 million views and have been seen on global TV.

Born in Nevada in 1970, Whitacre spent his formative years writing electronica and listening to Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode, then went to study at The Juilliard School, and in Las Vegas and – on a whim – joined a choir. “I thought, that’s the sound that’s been in my heart my whole life. It was a singular moment and it absolutely transformed me.”

His compositions have been widely recorded and his debut album as a conductor on Universal, Light and Gold, featuring the Eric Whitacre Singers, went straight to the top of the charts, earning him a Grammy.  His most recent album, Home, is a collaboration with VOCES8 on Universal Decca featuring compositions spanning his thirty-year composition career. A sought-after guest conductor, Eric has conducted choral and instrumental concerts around the globe, including concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Minnesota Orchestra. In addition to several collaborations with Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer and John Powell, he has worked with British pop icons Laura Mvula, Imogen Heap and Annie Lennox.

His composition for symphony orchestra and chorus, Deep Field, was inspired by the achievements of the Hubble Space Telescope and became the foundation for a collaboration with NASA, the Space Telescope Science Institute and 59 Productions, seen at arts and science festivals across the world.

Eric was Composer-in-Residence at Cambridge University from 2011 – 2016. He is currently Visiting Composer at Pembroke College, Cambridge University (UK) and is an Ambassador for the Royal College of Music, London.

A charismatic speaker, Eric Whitacre has given keynote addresses for many Fortune 500 companies, from Apple and Google to the World Economic Forum in Davos and the United Nations Speaker’s Program. His mainstage talks at the influential TED conference received standing ovations. His first collaboration with Spitfire Audio became an instant bestseller and is used by composers the world over.

About Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith (https://kaitlynaureliasmith.com/)

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith is a classically-trained American composer, performer, and producer from the Pacific Northwest. Her music is a form of auditory interpretation, powered by curiosity and her toolkit of modular, analogue, and rare synthesizers (including her signature Buchla), orchestral textures, and voice. Since her first self-releases in 2012, she has explored the endless possibilities of electronic instruments and the relationship between sound, shape, color, body movement, and expression. Spanning releases on Western Vinyl, RVNG Intl., Ghostly International, and her own multidisciplinary project, Touchtheplants, her work has drawn acclaim from all reaches of the experimental music world, including NPR, The New York Times, The Wire, and Rolling Stone. The latter named Smith’s 2017 LP The Kid their avant-garde album of the year. Her collaborations include projects with Danny Elfman, Emile Mosseri, Suzanne Ciani, and commissions for Apple, BBC Orchestra, Epcot Center, Google, and others. With Let’s Turn It Into Sound, her latest album on Ghostly, Smith moves through vibrant avant-pop and neoclassical songcraft, expressing a feeling that words alone cannot.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s formative years were spent communing with nature in Puget Sound, in the northwest region of Washington state. Smith left to attend Berklee College of Music, where she studied composition and sound engineering, initially focusing on her voice before switching to classical guitar and piano. She employed the skills she refined in college in her indie-folk project Ever Isles, but a fateful encounter with a neighbor who lent her a Buchla 100 synthesizer had a profound effect on her. She explains, “I got so distracted and enamored with the process of making sounds with it that I moved into an entirely new direction musically.”

In 2012, Smith began uploading various experiments and improvisations to Bandcamp. When recording the projects Cows will eat the weeds and Useful Trees, she set an intention to create one piece per day with her Buchla, guitar, piano, and voice on a 4-track. In 2013, she recorded Tides: Music for Meditation and Yoga, a collection of instrumentals commissioned by Smith’s mother to accompany her yoga practice. The album was given a vinyl release in 2019 via Touchtheplants, Smith’s publishing imprint for projects including her instrumental Electronic Series, various artist compilations, and pocket-sized poetry books on the practice of listening and hearing.

In 2015, Smith signed to Western Vinyl and released her first official album, Euclid, a playful and wide-eyed album that spurred from her experiments in writing music for geometric shapes while at the San Francisco Conservatory. Reviewing the album, Pitchfork likened the sound to Laurie Spiegel, High Places, and The Knife, noting, “a range that encompasses something approaching song structure and a form of ambient drift that nimbly floats up into the stratosphere.” The following year, Smith released EARS, a wonderstruck psychedelic breakthrough that expanded her palette of bubbling textures. Met with further acclaim, EARS landed on various year-end lists including Pitchfork, NPR, and Resident Advisor.

Smith continued her watershed 2016 with Sunergy, a collaborative album with longtime influence Suzanne Ciani released on RVNG Intl., and teamed up with Mark Pritchard for Absolut’s remix series, toured with Animal Collective, and soundtracked Google’s virtual tour series The Hidden Worlds of the National Parks. Throughout this time she also established herself in film and television scoring, with composer credits including Reggie Watts’ short film Brasilia: City of the Future and Miguel Arteta’s comedy Duck Butter, and music usage in Comedy Central’s Broad City and the Netflix series Disjointed.

The Kid saw release in 2017 to widespread praise, earning spots in year-end lists by NME, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and many others. The sprawling set is a sonic representation of four distinct stages of the human lifespan, from birth to self-awareness to the forging of one’s individual identity to old age and death. To support the album, she performed 170 shows throughout Australia, North America, Canada, South America, and Europe, including dates with Dan Deacon, Four Tet, and Tortoise, at venues such as The Hollywood Bowl, The Barbican, MoMA NYC, and the San Francisco Symphony. Her resume as a remixer also grew with notable reworks for the likes of Max Richtor, King Gizzard, Patti Smith, Danny Elfman, The Field, Perfume Genius, and Anoushka Shankar.

In 2020, Smith signed to Ghostly International to release The Mosaic of Transformation, an expression of love and appreciation for electricity. She partnered with the Calm app to preview the album, which presents a visual language she discovered through movement, the human body’s interpretation of frequencies, akin to a mosaic. Clash Magazine wrote, “she’s at the point where the tools at her disposal now fully reflect her, as opposed to the other way around.” Shortly after the release, in the early days of the pandemic, Smith and Oscar/GRAMMY-nominated composer Emile Mosseri started working on music together over email. Trading files back and forth, they arrived at I Could Be Your Dog (Prequel), a soft-focus dream world built from synthesizer, piano, electronics, and voice. A celebration of the human spirit, the music “blurred the lines between ethereal synth work and percussive neo-psych,” per Bandcamp. The duo resumed sessions for I Could Be Your Moon (Sequel), which completed the 2-part project, released together with the prequel as a full-length LP on Ghostly in spring 2022.  This collaboration saw some tasteful placements in Dior’s runway show and Louis Vuitton’s , Yayoi Kusama ad campaign.

Just months later, Smith returned with Let’s Turn It Into Sound, her most ambitious, intuitive, and inviting solo work to date. Musically, she deploys unexpected, non-linear pop structures and a new vocal processing technique to embody different characters of the self. The record’s visuals, created with longtime collaborator Sean Hellfritsch using a motion-capture suit, further interpret these signals from the subconscious and their relationship to the body. Other ventures in 2022 include working with Tyler Bates on the score for the new Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind attraction at the Epcot Theme Park in Walt Disney World Florida. She also contributed to the soundtrack for the Lee Alexander Mcqueen: Mind Mythos Muse exhibition at LACMA as well as an original composition to the new Dungeons & Dragons compilation SPELLJAMS, and the score to Jordan Speer’s animated short film Sunbelly originally aired inside Toonami / Adult Swim.  Currently scoring “Omni Loop” directed by Bernardo Britto (Los Espookys).

About Clark (https://throttleclark.com/)

Chris Clark has worked with music and sound for twenty years. Signed at an early age to legendary British indie label Warp Records, he has to date released thirteen albums as well as a multitude of EPs and singles. In May 2023 he presented ‘Sus Dog’, his tenth studio album and the first to fully focus on his voice. Released on his own burgeoning label Throttle Records, the record was mentored and executive produced by Thom Yorke, who sings and plays bass on the track ‘Medicine’.

“Chris wrote me to say he’d started singing, looking for feedback/advice or whatever, cuz it was kind of new shark-infested waters for him. I’ve been into what he does for years, and I ended up being a kind of backseat driver as he pieced all the oddness of it together, which was fascinating”, comments Thom Yorke.

“I wasn’t surprised to discover he came at singing and words through another door completely, which to me was the most interesting and exciting part. The first thing he sent me was him singing about being stuck between two floors and I was already sold. To me the way he approached it all wasn’t the usual singer songwriter guff thank god; it mirrored the way he approached all his composition and recording, but this time it had a human face. His face.”

Unlike previous LP ‘Playground In A Lake’, which turned impending ecological doom into beautiful dark art, on ‘Sus Dog’ Clark often sounds uplifting, albeit in his own inimitable way.

Purveying a sort of skewed-psychedelic-hardcore-dream-pop-brilliance, prior to beginning Clark “kept on thinking ‘what would it sound like if The Beach Boys took MDMA and made a rave record?’”. This early seed grew into something epic – abundant with aural and poetic depth, clues, inferences and in- jokes. It’s clearly brilliant and immediately enjoyable, but there’s much to unpack: It’s a big but tantalizing undertaking, where plenty more treasure can be discovered amidst layers of ambiguity, obliqueness and abstraction.

Following his 2015 debut score for Sky / Canal+ TV series ‘The Last Panthers’ (John Hurt / Samantha Morton, dir: Johan Renck), he scored ‘Rellik’ for BBC1 / HBO (Richard Lancaster dir: Sam Miller) and breakout Channel 4 / Hulu drama ‘Kiri’ (Sarah Lancashire, dir: Euros Lynn, written by Jack Thorne).

Most recently he scored Apple TV+’s ‘Lisey’s Story’ (Julianne Moore, Clive Owen, dir. Pablo Larraín) based on Stephen King’s novel, as well as ‘Daniel Isn’t Real’ (Patrick Schwarzenegger, Miles Robbins) a psychological horror feature film by Spectre Vision, producers of cult Nick Cage hit ‘Mandy’. The film’s OST released by Deutsche Grammophon.

Chris has frequently collaborated with choreographer Melanie Lane, scoring no less than eleven contemporary dance projects including the performance of her solo project ‘Tilted Fawn’ at the Sydney Opera House and most recently ‘Personal Effigies’ which won the Kier Choreographic Prize in March 2018 and ‘WOOF’ for the prestigious Sydney Dance Company.

Chris’ extensive inventory of remixes for the likes of Thom Yorke, Massive Attack, Depeche Mode, Max Richter, Battles and Nils Frahm were collected in 2013 on the ‘Feast / Beast’ double album.

About Ryan Lott (https://ryan-lott.com/)

Ryan Lott is a composer, producer, and performer. In 2007, Ryan founded Son Lux, releasing music that “works at the nexus of several rarely-overlapping Venn Diagrams” (Pitchfork). In 2014, Son Lux became a trio, both live and on record, with the additions of guitarist-composer Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang. Their latest studio release is an album trilogy called Tomorrows, released in full in 2021. As a band, Son Lux scored the 2023 Best Picture Winner Everything Everywhere All at Once, which earned them a BAFTA and Academy Award nomination, with a second Academy Award nomination for their end-credit song collaboration with Mitski and David Byrne.

An avid collaborator in dance, Lott has worked with choreographers Stephen Petronio, Gina Gibney, Kyle Abraham, and Jodie Gates, along with companies The Royal Ballet, Ballet de Lorraine, National Dance Company of Wales, and BalletX. His feature film scores include The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby (2014), Paper Towns (2015), and Mean Dreams (2017), and arrangements for several others, most notably the iconic sci-fi film Looper (2012), for which Ryan was also pianist and instrument designer.

He is frequently commissioned by new music ensembles, including eighth blackbird (Lott contributed to their GRAMMY-winning 2015 release Filament), GRAMMY winners Third Coast Percussion, and yMusic, who enlisted Lott to compose their entire 2017 release First. Other recent commissions include an arrangement of “Peace Like A River” for Paul Simon, and a new orchestral work, “The Swift & the Storm,” for the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. He has several releases under his own name, including the learning structures cycle and the original Tell Me Why game soundtrack, heralded as “the new gold standard for trans characters in games.”

About Spitfire Audio (www.spitfireaudio.com)

Spitfire Audio is a British music technology company that specializes in sounds — sample libraries, virtual instruments, and other useful software devices. It collaborates with the best composers, artists, and engineers in the world to build musical tools that sound great and are exciting to use.

Spitfire Audio was founded by two award-winning composers. Born out of their shared dissatisfaction with string sample libraries, they pooled their resources and decided to record their own string samples at the legendary Air Studios in London. Initially, they invited a limited number of friends and associates to own copies of their samples, but whispers of this private sample club soon started to echo across the Atlantic Ocean throughout the composer community. Within a year, some of the most renowned composers in film and television signed up, so they decided to take their samples public.

To date, Spitfire Audio has recorded and released over 200 sample libraries, collaborating with some of the biggest names in media composition, including Hans Zimmer, Eric Whitacre, Ólafur Arnalds & the London Contemporary Orchestra. Spitfire Audio’s sounds are heard in everything, from major Hollywood film scores to recordings by Radiohead and U2. This initial side project is now a thriving international music technology enterprise, with a uniquely experienced and diverse workforce, all focused on a shared mission: to inspire a generation of composers. The composer team remains at the center of the business, drawing on their own experience as obsessive music makers to explore the needs and wants of their fellow composers.