This blog post is about Sensory Percussion version 1 and does not apply to the latest version 2 software included in the EVANS Hybrid Sensory Percussion bundle.
Swarm Sapience is an all new sound pack inspired by the hive-mind containing kits with bubbly, stereophonic cycles, colorful chords and notes, staccato drum machines, and intimately abstract percussion! Some of these kits are tonal, some are strictly percussive. We included non-tonal versions of all of the tonal kits, which is something many of our users asked for.
The 556 samples included in this pack are organized into three categories: Electro Drum Kits, Notes and Chords, and Percussion.
Each of the seven folders in Electro Drum Kits contains a collection of heavily processed drum-machine sounds. The Percussion folder is overflowing with the sounds of percussive trinkets recorded with contact microphones and then verbed out. The Notes and Chords folder has the sounds of eight synthy instruments, each contains at least one progression with vibey chord voicings.
Kits
amyCycles
Cycling, pitched, stereo-dreamscapes inhabit Drum 2 and Drum 3 of this kit. The sharp percussive sounds originate from the Eusociality Drums collection: named for the highest level of organization within the animal kingdom: ants, bees, parasitic shrimp, naked-mole rats, and — debatably — humans are eusocial. This kit comes straight from the hive-mind!
Rat Utopia
The chords mapped to Drum 3 can be switched on and off by striking the rim-tip of Drum 4. I thought I was original and edgy for naming the chords used in this kit after a deadly space virus that I day-dreamed one day, but then I remembered that's the entire premise for The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton.
Behavioral Sink
This kit is named for James Cahoun's controversial theory that moral human behavior collapses as population density increases.
Uneven, immersive, stereo, percussive cycles emanate from the head and rim of Drum 3 in Behavioral Sink. “What does that mean?” you ask. It means that there are two samplers mapped to the head of Drum 3 — one panned left, one panned right — each contains the same stack of samples set to “cycle” mode, but the one on the right has one fewer sample. In this particular case that creates a 9 against 8 polymetric cycle between the panned samplers.
Malthus
Dense cycles of notes ring out from the four hard-panned samplers on the head of Drum 2 in Malthus.
They are pitched to a C-minor pentatonic scale, two of those samplers use one of my favorite quantized pitching techniques enabled by Sensory Percussion: a center-to-edge timbre controller governs the pitch, but the center's sensitivity of that controller is set pretty high (making it have a larger strike zone than the edge, and therefore making it easy to hit the tonic). The other two samplers are pitched by velocity.
Universe 25
The habitat used to demonstrate James Calhoun's societal collapse theory was called Universe 25. It was described as a mouse paradise, and he created conditions that allowed the animals to breed to the point of immense overpopulation, carefully observing each generation's increasingly destructive behavior along the way.
His results have been used interpret human phenomena such as urban decay. But I think it's important to remember that mice are not humans — they can't write or enforce policies or solve complex problems.
This kit has pretty notes randomized to a custom scale on Drum 2, and a chain of cycled chords mapped to Drum 3. Amaury Acosta plays this kit in the video at the top of this post.
