Eclipsed Sounds 4th Anniversary - Team Reflections

Eclipsed Sounds 4th Anniversary - Team Reflections

For our 4th anniversary, we took some time to sit down and look back on the last few years from the beginning, covering a few topic areas that our users often have questions about!

 

Planning Ahead

Oftentimes, our users are surprised to hear about our long development timelines - here, the team talks a bit about what our planning and development timelines have looked like for our current lineup.

Elijah: Even way back in the beginning with SOLARIA, we had lightly discussed plans on where to go next. We knew we wanted to do if the stars (pun unintended) aligned: a bass vocal and, if things worked out, a tenor. While we floated an alto as well back then, what became NYL was not actually fully developed as an idea until around the time we met Seann (in 2023!), HXVOC’s voice provider.

As many may know from our previous retrospective, ASTERIAN and SAROS were both cast at about the same time. We had previously tried to scout vocalists for them via a casting call on a website, but did not click with someone the way we did with Eric Holloway for ASTERIAN and with SAROS’ voice provider. We ended up finding both of them through different methods (not to be disclosed here!).

For where we're at now - even though HXVOC and GALENAIA are still newcomers to our lineup, we’ve already got a grasp on where to go next!

Brielle: Its true! We always have so many things hidden in our back pocket. Honestly, it’s really good for us to plan ahead because we can keep an eye on other releases, as well as the climate of the user-base at any time. Some ideas we have to say “this is not the appropriate moment for” and shift focus to something else.

Taylor: Even though we do have these long development timelines, by keeping development moving at all times it allows us to keep releases coming - though our users keep requests coming much faster than we can match pace with still! We keep all requests and potential contacts on-file regardless, so we’re always sure to reference those first when spinning up a new project.

Assembling the Team

As our founder, Elijah originally brought all of us together to pursue vocal development with Eclipsed Sounds - we enjoyed reminiscing on the early days and seeing how things have grown over the last 4 years.

Elijah: I started Eclipsed Sounds in high school with big dreams, but ended up leaving it on the back burner for many years, as school obviously took more focus. It was still a few years before I met the rest of the Eclipsed Sounds team. Taylor and I actually knew each other, all the way back in middle school, but fell out of touch! It’s fun looking back at how we all knew of each other, but hadn’t spoken much before we became friends. This is when I met Brielle, Niamh and irunabara.

We didn’t all go “Hey! Lets make a Synthesizer V!” then. A lot of the time, it was just being friends and playing games and hanging out. After a while, I brought up that old idea with Taylor, Niamh and irunabara and it all kicked off from there. A lot of planning went into SOLARIA before we even approached Dreamtonics. We even wrote a 20 page long essay for our pitch. Most of the beginning funding before the IndieGogo campaign came from our jobs and COVID stimulus checks.

Beginning with Phase 2, we’ve onboarded a new consultation team! They’ve already helped us with so much. Thank you Tone Chroma Consultation Team!

Taylor: I totally forgot about it but Eli is right - on my end I pretty much spent my entire “salary” from my teaching assistant job in college to pitch in with funding Eclipsed Sounds pre-crowdfund! We really had this risk-it-all approach in the early days where we threw ourselves into it, but we all wanted to make sure our collaborators from outside the core team were paid at least in part before the crowdfund so that if the project failed, the only ones to take a financial loss would be our core team. Even though our team has seen a lot of change since then - with the departure of Niamh and irunabara and the addition of Brielle & our extremely skilled Tone Chroma Consultation Team, I think that core focus of making sure that everyone - from artists to songwriters to our users - is being treated equitably and focused on has stayed really core to what we do at Eclipsed Sounds!

Brielle: I remember seeing things come together from the sidelines early on, and it’s so crazy to see how the team has evolved over time! Having the Tone Chroma Consultation Team has been really revitalizing, and I’m happy that we’re going full steam ahead into the future.

 

Joining As A New Teammate

Brielle is our only core team member who joined later on, coming onto the project around ASTERIAN's development time period. They share more about their experience around that time!

Brielle: It was a really interesting experience when I joined ES. I live with Taylor, and before I joined, I remember hearing small bits and pieces about how ASTERIAN’s design process was going. I was immediately surprised by the amount of tiny details the group were putting thought into for his look! I was super excited by the idea of helping design any potential other characters in the lineup (I had no knowledge of any future ideas or plans Eclipsed Sounds had). Taylor and Eli taught me how to process the voice, and it definitely took me awhile to fully get the exact way ASTERIAN needed to be worked with. Once we finished with him, it felt so amazing! To actually hear the samples before they were made into a SynthV only made me even more confident in the program’s ability to faithfully recreate a person’s voice. While I did have a lot of catching up to do with the others, I’m now confident in myself to be another full member of the team! Without Taylor and Eli’s tutelage, I’d still be struggling like back then. I love my job!

Elijah: Brielle we appreciate you!! It’s like you’ve always been here! In the background, living with Taylor and knowing our every move. Thank you for all your hard work!!!

Taylor: Thank you for joining when we really needed a pinch-hitter! I remember the week you joined like it was yesterday - running you through the full details of anything and not the vague comments you heard from before, and now you’ll even remind us of things from the early days that we’ve forgotten!

 

Day in the Life

With a small team in a unique industry, many users have asked us what our day-to-day looks like - the team breaks this down and discusses splits in responsibility.

Taylor: At Eclipsed Sounds - it’s almost totally different each day. We’re a super small team, so we tend to keep ourselves flexible in order to accommodate users’ needs as best we can. Most days for me start with email-based customer support, but depending on the needs of the day I may need to start with something else. The latter option can change due to the type of cycle we are in - I’ll be making website updates or video editing during promotion cycles, audio processing during development cycles, or picking up other types of tasks if the need arises. I try to be reliable to my fellow team members, so I usually handle any one-off responsibilities on top of my day-to-day work. Other than that, I typically lead meetings and spend any remaining time on development or promotion tasks. 

Brielle: Agreed 100%! Every day is a little bit different for each of us. Some of the things I do during any workday is checking emails with artists or collaborators, scouring the internet for content with our vocals, and reading up on the opinions of users on different forums! When we’re not actively working on a voice, I’m also often looking for artists we want to work with in the future. Thank you Taylor for always heading our meetings!

Elijah: I tend to work on the budget and finances every single day. I like it! I usually find myself just going and poking around in my spare time, as well. I also help with the audio processing, but Taylor’s got it down to a T while I’m still catching up to speed. You may occasionally see a customer support email or two from me, but I tend to work more on the back end with business and financial collaborators.

When we all had full time jobs as well as working Eclipsed Sounds part time, we used to meet once a week. When we moved to full time, we the three of us had that realization that, “oh, we can meet whenever we want now.” Only, after the meeting we always end up having to do something before getting to work again.

Taylor is the MVP! Thank you for doing so much for us!

Learning on the Fly

Starting in the vocal synthesis space as a brand new company comes with its own challenges - and one of those was having to learn everything by doing it! The team talks about this process as well as the preparation we went in with.

Taylor: I think we’re very lucky to have a flexible and detail-oriented environment at Eclipsed Sounds - so we’ve been able to learn a lot in the process of putting out our vocals! We studied the industry in detail before jumping in of course - but the industry has also changed a great deal just in the last 4 years, and we’ve been in a great position to keep adjusting as that happened. There’s also a lot that we’ve learned about the general plugin market that we’ve been able to adapt to - thanks to our own observations, the feedback from our users, and from the great advice we’ve gotten from music industry mentors we have been lucky enough to connect with.

Brielle: It certainly helps that we’ve each been entrenched in the vocal synth community as users and fans for over 10 years now! Being able to interact with folks outside of the space has given us an understanding of that kind of scene as well, and we really try to have events and releases that are what both sides of the userbase are looking for! Sometimes things change, but we’re pretty adept at that, im my opinion!

Elijah: You both always summarize what I want to say faster than I say it! To add on: in the beginning, there wasn’t a lot of stuff to go off of for planning - just other releases from previous vocal synthesizers. Even from that, it’s hard to find hard data on numbers, sales, demographics… You could say it was an uphill battle, but we made it! Since then, so much of it has become second nature. We’ve learned a lot more of where to look for what and how to find who we need.

 

A Team of 3

The team chats more about flexibility and our small size while focusing more on general operations.

Brielle: There’s definitely many things that we as three people can get done faster than a larger team. Communication is really fast and easy, and we can usually get things sent to one another pretty quickly. We also have less to worry about in regards to “office politics” and things like that. Generally, we’re a chill trio and we get things done together easily! 

The other side of the coin is that oftentimes we’ll come up with big ideas, but just not have enough man power to actually do them. It can also be overwhelming with support emails/refunds/other online business things. Overall though, I think the group is always looking for ways to improve our methods, and we try to keep open minds about changing things up! 

Elijah: Yeah, all of this exactly! We have a lot of fun in our day-to-day meetings and tend to joke around a lot of the time. What might be a 15 minute long meeting goes into an hour because we start talking about things going on in life.

Lack of manpower can be really difficult. If something pops up for one person, then suddenly it goes down to a team of two. For example, I injured my back and ended up on bedrest late last year (2024) and sat out for probably two weeks worth of planning and meeting with Taylor, Brielle and the Tone Chroma team. 

Taylor: I think that because we’re a small team though it makes it a bit easier to bounce back from those sorts of medical absences! Because we’re a small team and learned most of this together, everyone has at least a little bit of an idea of how to handle each others’ responsibilities - so in a pinch we end up covering pretty well! The only thing that’s really an issue is that sometimes work piles up and it takes us longer than usual to complete things when quite a few things are going on, but even if we’re small in the end we focus on being reliable even when things end up delayed!

 

Mascot Design Process

Users often ask about our process for the mascot designs for the voice databases - we talk about them a little here, primarily going over the Starry Court as those were done by our core team.

Brielle: When it comes to designing our vocal mascots, we start with the theme. Before anything had even been figured out for NYL, for example, we knew we wanted to create a character that represented the void of space. The lengthy process of finding the perfect voice provider often overlapped with generalized name and color scheme concepts. Once we found who we wanted to work with and got the go-ahead, we’d figure out just how much of the voice provider we wanted to include in the look! Since the team went down that route with Emma Rowley, we continued with that tradition for the other Starry Court members as well. All of us created different concept art and mood boards to get the general feel for the design. From there, we’d choose things we liked on every different design, and refine and combine. We’d do this over and over and over again until we felt confident in the look, and were ready to send the reference sheet to our artist! It’s a very collaborative process, and no one person can quite take all credit for any of the Starry Court! 

Elijah: I don’t know if I have a single character designing bone in my body! Everyone else always comes up with such great ideas, and I end up doing mood board concepts every time. For each vocal I always sent one of the same ideas, too, except I couldn’t ever remember what it was called and would just say “that one thing they do in (a TV show)” or even put a picture from that TV show. What I was referring to was unmoving plaid in how the capes look! Every single time, Taylor would jokingly say, “Yeah Eli we know.”

Taylor: Someday we’ll have the opportunity to execute on that idea I’m sure of it! On my end in the process I tried to take a “glue” sort of role where I don’t typically lead with raw ideas but focus more on refinement and unifying the ideas of the rest of the team! The one situation where that ended up being a bit different was when it came to ASTERIAN’s design in particular, which I mostly generated the concept for, but overall I like to think I’ve helped primarily with cohesion. Our mascot design process has changed quite a bit going forward with the Tone Chroma series though, where we’ve primarily left the process in the capable hands of our series design lead rice! We end up with a good amount of back and forth - but their genius really frees us up to focus even more on development.

 

Fun Facts

• ASTERIAN saw the most name changes during development. GALENAIA also changed names, while SAROS’s name was suggested as an out there idea for a future vocal before SOLARIA’s name was finalized!

• ASTERIAN’s name concepts were being discussed when the team met up originally to pack and ship SOLARIA’s crowdfund campaign rewards

• During the IndieGogo campaign, various short promotional videos were created using the SOLARIA standard test voice. These ended up being scrapped to avoid confusion of the test voice and her AI voice from over-use. One of these was affectionately called “frog beat”.

• While waiting for SOLARIA’s standard test voice to be completed, we made a behind the scenes test voice in a concatenative environment to get an idea of what she sounded like. It’s so different compared to her test standard version in Synthesizer V Studio, let alone her final AI voice!

Starting on Tone Chroma

Moving into the future, our team talks about our new perspective with the new vocal series and when that all began.

Elijah: While we knew we wanted to make vocals to span the SATB range, the beginnings of Tone Chroma go back to the development of SOLARIA. While the Starry Court was always intended to “end”, Tone Chroma (at the time known as “genre vocals”) was made to be ongoing and no need for an “ending”. When we met Seann, we knew it was finally time to make the switch. NYL’s development began but in the background, we were beginning to assemble our Phase 2 team and consider the lore and design inspiration elements.

Fun fact: I actually missed the meeting about what each color meant in regards to the genre.

Brielle: Developing just the world-building for Tone Chroma took many months! We wanted to create something that an average user didn’t necessarily have to know about, but instead sprinkle those small details in for folks who are interested in finding them!

Taylor: I think that Tone Chroma has a really clear direction so far - and it’s really all thanks to our Phase 2 team! Everyone has truly put their all in and I’m so excited to see where it leads. There’s of course a lot more dimensions to the project compared to the Starry Court, but regardless of branching out, our primary focus is still the voice databases themselves, and our sub team’s incredible work and brilliance helps that stay true! 

 

Focusing on our Users

We close with a discussion on our company's core focus - the users that make this all possible!

Taylor: We’ve probably touched on this in other areas of this post - but our users are at the very center of everything we do as Eclipsed Sounds. This might be a bit too business-oriented of a description, but we decided really early on that we are running this company with an old-school growth focus: if we provide products that our users want, then we’ll work on making more, and if users aren’t there, then we’ll call it quits. That might be a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many start-ups out there just constantly raise money without an end goal on providing a useful product! Beyond that - the singers we work with are also integral to this process, and we want to make sure we treat their voices with care and not as just a means to an end. The intersection of our users’ experience and doing right by our voice providers points the perfect path forward, in our opinion! We’re always trying to stay responsive to users and keep working with singers who fit the needs of our customers, without losing sight of our sustainable and equitable principles. Thank you to everyone who’s supported us so far - I hope we can remain a company you are proud to have invested in, as a crowdfund backer all the way back at the beginning, or even as an everyday customer, we won’t ever forget your support!

Elijah: Taylor always puts everything I’d like to say into words! This has always been our goal from the very beginning. SOLARIA funds were put in ASTERIAN, ASTERIAN was put into SAROS, and so on. Each voice provider receives royalties for their sales, regardless of anonymity or publicity. We’re extremely grateful we’ve gotten to the point we’re able to fund all of this and our own lives. Of course, we don’t always come up with everything on our own, so if you have an idea or suggestion we will always gladly hear it! We take every voice provider, producer, collaborator and product pitch seriously. Our users have give so much to us and we want to continue filling people’s wants and needs in return. Thank you all so much!

Brielle: Doing these retrospectives and blog posts has really helped the team be more straightforward with everyone who uses our voices, and I sincerely thank everyone who has taken the time to read them. Eclipsed Sounds is quite literally nothing without the amazing people that have supported us and helped us along the way- voice providers and collaborators included! NAMM and other in-person events have made a space that we as an online business wouldn’t normally have access to, and I’ve learned a lot in our time there. It has been a wonderful experience to hear from folks both online and off about what they want to see from us - know that we really do listen and take opinions into account! Thank you, everyone. We’ll continue to do our best.