Rating: 4.5/5 Stars
I’ve experienced the calming sounds of a singing bowl in person exactly once in my life, but I couldn’t tell you much about the experience because not long after my friend at university began playing the bowl, I fell asleep. I have, however, managed to stay awake and alert while exploring Time Crystals, the new library from Emergence Audio, which pairs their very modern and now well‑known Non‑Static Sampling and Infinite Motion Engine 2.0 technologies with the resonance of quartz singing bowls that have calmed humans for centuries.
It’s a simple concept: textures in the form of drones, pads, pulses and strikes originating from the sounds of singing bowls, equipped with detailed MIDI CC control to further shape the tones. Creatively, it’s a double‑edged sword because while there are no static loops in this Kontakt library, things are so fluid that if you aren’t recording your experiments, you may stumble upon a wonderful sound but never find it again as you go through long evolving performances with subtle variations.
As important as the singing bowl is the tool you play it with, and Time Crystals offers three options: mallet, suede and wooden striker. The differences in tone are most apparent up to C4, after which they all start to generate bell‑like tones with more muted or sharper attacks, depending on the selection of tools. The basic patch for each striker works as a building block to create your own textural pieces. For layered sounds, you have more than 160 presets to work with, including single patches or more elaborate multis.
While the library boasts an eight‑octave range, there is definitely a sweet spot for each patch in terms of where it unfolds best. Each time I loaded a patch, the first thing I found myself doing was auditioning octaves until the sound seemed to come alive. Across the library you have everything from ominous low drones to crystal clear high notes that ring out delicately.
Modulation and movement are central to the library, and riding the mod wheel brings interesting results at the default level, even before you assign specific parameters to MIDI CC according to your preference. The velocity sensitivity slider (found on the GUI’s Main page as ‘Vel’) is particularly useful for this library. Since a lot of the patches are played with long‑held notes to let the sounds evolve, having control over velocity means that you can press down on the keys as hard as you like, without suddenly generating a sound that is too loud in a uniformly quiet passage.
The use cases for this library are gentle, ambient cues, textural underscore, and straight up meditative music, but there’s also some fun to be had with more gritty, percussive sounds, like in the Termination Pulse patch, for example.
Emergence Audio have already established that they offer solid source material with precise control, and with Time Crystals they continue to deliver on that promise.
With their previous collections, Emergence Audio have already established that they offer solid source material with precise control, and with Time Crystals they continue to deliver on that promise. After weeks of playing with it, I had one minor quibble. They say Time Crystals “invites you to shape time”, but I found it most suitable for pieces where you want to lose all sense of time — not slow it down, or speed it up... just forget that it exists.