Supervising Sound Editor Nigel Holland asked me to use Kyma Sound Processing to help create the sound of the Licker monster from Paul Anderson’s movie “Resident Evil”.
Nigel took an English vocal artist, Pete, as his basis, who first drank two litres of full-cream milk and then roared it into a monster-like arrangement of buckets and pipes. We developed a Dual-MonoVocoder with two times 50 bands, which was fed at the input with different loops of animal sounds and other diagonal tones. We were able to control the proportions of these sounds and many other important parameters via motor faders. Pete’s performance was at the modulation input.
Kymas Vocoder can continuously shift the center frequencies of the bandpass filters in the analysis input against the filters in the modulation path. This has a similar effect to variable pitch shifting. Here, too, Kyma’s live character was decisive. We played Kyma like an instrument with the motor faders to the running picture. The result was not only sounds for the monster, but a whole library of spooky sounds that Nigel used as atmospheric effects.
The results were also published as part of the Sample-Library “Evil Sounds” by Hollywood Edge.
Two examples:
