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Phonautograms Black Friday pricing is $2.50, 50% off, until Dec 6, 2026, for Soundiron's Kontakt instrument built from one of the earliest human sound recordings.
It is a chromatic solo vocal instrument. The source is a vocal scale sung by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville himself, titled Gamme de la Voix, or "range of voice".
The original recording was made with phonautography, which Scott de Martinville invented in the early 1850s. A cylindrical horn fed a stylus that traced vibrations onto sheets of paper blackened with oil lamp soot.
The French Academy of Sciences kept those sheets. First Sounds later decoded them with laser scanning at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Soundiron spliced, edited and reshaped the raw audio into a playable instrument. Then they warped it with sound design into ambient soundscapes, textures, tonal pads, synths, atmospheres, drones and resynthesized drums.
The interface has automation-ready controls for swell, attack, release, offset, vibrato, filter, coarse and fine pitch, articulation switching, cross-fading and layering.
The LFO system lets you pick the shape, modulation target, speed, intensity, tempo sync and fade-in time. Phonautograms offers 12 filters covering lowpass, high-pass and FX types. Each one can be driven by velocity, modwheel, expression, aftertouch, where a key sits on the keyboard, or a step-sequencer table.
The arpeggiator has a velocity table and settings for direction, timing, swing, randomization and duration. A key and scale lock keeps your notes inside common scales and keys.
The modular FX rack holds 18 DSP modules across 10 slots, in any order. It covers phaser, flanger, delay, distortion, amp and cab simulators, compressors, EQ and rotator.
The convolution reverb carries 99 rooms, halls, chambers and outdoor spaces, plus 40 custom FX impulses. Factory FX rack chain presets are included.
The full retail version of Native Instruments Kontakt 5.5 or later is required. The free Kontakt Player does not support this library and will leave you in demo mode.
Soundiron recommends a dual-core CPU, 2 GB of RAM and a SATA or SSD drive. It runs on Windows 7 or higher and Mac OSX 10.9 or higher, and downloads over a broadband connection.
Yes. The Phonautograms Black Friday deal is 50% off Soundiron's Kontakt library, bringing it to $2.50. The offer ends Dec 6, 2026.
It comes from Gamme de la Voix, a vocal scale sung by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville and captured by phonautography in the 1850s. Soundiron edited it into a chromatic solo vocal, then sound-designed it into pads, drones and textures.
No. It needs the full retail version of Native Instruments Kontakt 5.5 or later. The free Player and the Add Library import process do not support this open-format library, and you would be stuck in demo mode.
You get one master NKI bank, the Gamme de la Voix vocal instrument, Phonautodrums, 31 Ambience patches and 20 custom FX presets. That is 147 stereo samples at 24 bit / 48 kHz, 445 MB installed.
Prices and end dates are checked at publishing time and can change, so confirm them at the store before you buy.