“Starry Court” Series Retrospective - Development, Design, & Decisions Made for our First Vocal Series

A recounting of the choices and intentions put into our flagship series - the “Starry Court”.

It has been a long road from our crowdfund in 2021 to where we are now! Developing for Synthesizer V Studio has been the experience and privilege of a lifetime for us, and we are so grateful for your support of our tiny team. We’re excited to share a peek behind the curtain for the Starry Court!

So you know my perspective - I’m Taylor Hennessy. I’m the CEO and still-acting Lead Developer at Eclipsed Sounds. I am the primary developer for audio curation and vocal modes, and as it happens I also became the primary go-between for voice providers for the Starry Court after SOLARIA. I generally just tend to pick up any odd jobs for the company - so you may have run into me during email support as well!

Crowdfund & Initial Launch Lead-Up

In case you weren’t aware, we began as a crowdfunded project to create our first vocal, SOLARIA, in May of 2021. The idea for SOLARIA began with our founder & current CFO Elijah Damon, who happened to meet Emma Rowley while working at a local recording studio. He explained the concept of vocal synthesizers to her and she was really interested - so he gathered up the rest of the team and formed the Eclipsed Sounds that eventually launched the crowdfund.

Despite how cohesive our lineup may seem now, we actually did not begin with any plans beyond SOLARIA herself. Dreamtonics was taking a big risk with us, and we knew that bringing more than just one, reasonable project would be unwise and maybe a little presumptuous in the early stages. We didn’t even discuss the possibility of additional vocals beyond SOLARIA internally until September 2021, when it was quite honestly just a teambuilding distraction during development stress. After discussing SAROS and ASTERIAN’s concepts at that time, we thought it best to put all thoughts of those completely to the side for the foreseeable future. However, after SOLARIA’s release, we knew we had to fill the need for more missing vocal types after all. While SAROS and ASTERIAN had been very loosely discussed in 2021 and decided on in mid 2022, NYL was suggested in September of 2022 so that SAROS could remain a dedicated tenor.

Development Goals

Our goal with the entire Starry Court series was to provide a set of vocals that, together, would let you create any kind of song. We really see this group as the perfect set of tools - while they may not tonally match every single genre, they should provide enough that you can draft with them easily, add additional vocal layers, and really write out your ideas without needing to call a friend every time to fill in your temporary vocal part.

With each individual vocal, however, it was to fill a niche not currently adequately served by other voices at the time - for SOLARIA that niche was a solid pop-adjacent mezzo-soprano, for ASTERIAN it was a true bass vocal, for SAROS a power tenor that could really hit high notes, and for NYL a contralto vocalist with a warm and supported voice. Something very important to us as well was focusing on group fit with each vocal - making sure that each pair of voices within the Starry Court could be used together without any issue, and that the group would blend well together when finally complete.

Casting Process

While we began with SOLARIA’s voice provider already selected, our other vocals went through a process of selection during the concept period. While we tried to host auditions, most singers who applied did not take note of our specifications and didn’t fit into the ranges we were looking for, so we ended up scouting SAROS and ASTERIAN’s voice providers directly off of social media. NYL’s voice provider was directly scouted as well, but from a portfolio site.

When considering vocalists during casting, our main concern was if the singers were skilled enough to fit the types of genres users want to see from their vocal ranges, and if they met these range requirements plus additional flexibility. For instance, ASTERIAN’s voice provider Eric Hollaway is definitely a bass, but more than that, he is an oktavist, one of the lowest voice types in the world. This ensured, for a series based on covering specific ranges, that ASTERIAN would fit his defined role and then some.

Production Challenges

Each vocal we’ve worked with so far after has had its own development difficulties that have come along with the type of voice, project goals, and even just scheduling issues. For SOLARIA, we would say the main difficulty was learning everything from the ground up. Dreamtonics helped us out with training and best practices for the development process, and I learned audio cleaning on the fly as well during this time. Many of SOLARIA’s recordings originally had a good degree of reverb, so stripping that out took a long time, but in the end she broke through these challenges and opened the doors for the rest of our series.

During ASTERIAN’s development, in the middle of the recording process his voice provider Eric Hollaway had to evacuate due to a hurricane, setting our timeline back significantly. On top of this, due to his incredible, unique voice, Dreamtonics had to make changes to the engine of Synthesizer V Studio itself to accommodate such a deep ranged vocalist! Our timeline was significantly crunched and a lot of development was done blind without being able to guess how the end vocal would sound. We owe a lot of thanks to the demo songwriters who worked for us during this time, as everything was really unpredictable with his development and release.

For SAROS - the obvious challenge was the implementation of Spanish. While Spanish capability was a plan for SAROS since the initial teaser, it took a long time to be able to implement the language and the data. It’s still in a state we would really like to continue to improve, but there are additional factors that go into when and how these improvements can be made that are slowing us down a bit. However, we’re keeping Spanish in our focus for upcoming projects, and are hoping to add quite a few more Spanish vocals to our long-term Phase 2 plans as we move into the next section. Another more internal challenge with SAROS was recording time. SAROS’ voice provider is incredibly busy, and so finding time to record for the voice database took much longer than expected - you would never guess it, but SAROS’ voice provider signed on around the same time as Eric Hollaway did for ASTERIAN!

With NYL, our first hurdle was casting. We knew from the beginning of NYL’s project that we needed a contralto, as we wanted to ensure that songwriters writing for contraltos had an option on Synthesizer V Studio. However, contralto is one of the rarest voice types in the world, and it’s very difficult to find performers with that voice type willing to provide their vocals to digital singers. We were extremely lucky that Zay Driver, NYL’s voice provider, agreed to work with us in the end! Beyond casting difficulties, NYL faced a similar challenge to SAROS, as recording time was just hard to come by. Zay signed onto the project around September of 2023, and our original hope was to announce in the following spring, but the project just kept needing more time. Half of our team also moved across the country during this process, so things were thrown out of sync because of that as well. We also had a lot of trouble defining vocal modes for NYL, as Zay is such a dynamic singer with so many layers to their voice that we really struggled to narrow down recordings enough to capture what we wanted to! That said, I think we’ve really managed to do it in the end.

Vocal Mode Design

Work on Vocal Modes has become a major focus of our team over the course of the Starry Court’s development due to the feature’s alignment with our goals to make the Starry Court flexible for many genres. 

Recording Process

Vocal Modes were originally introduced a few months after SOLARIA’s release in Spring of 2022. While we focused on making SOLARIA’s recordings as consistent as possible during her initial development, we knew this opened up a new opportunity for our vocals going forward. Additionally, despite SOLARIA being aimed toward consistency, Emma Rowley is an incredible vocalist and we still ended up with quite a bit of nuance we were able to pinpoint with SOLARIA’s vocal modes, so no additional recording was done to create them. We followed this development philosophy with the rest of the Starry Court, and avoided recording with intent for specific Vocal Modes. We have found that this worked best for our intentions with the series to create flexible voices, and think that this created more nuanced tones than we would have gotten with specific direction.

Narrowing Down Vocal Modes

After all of the recordings are processed, we identify which tones we want to isolate from the recordings and collect data that matches those tones. We generally focus on identifying as many distinct tones as possible, and then narrowing them down based on how they come out after processing in Synthesizer V Studio. As a result, as our process matured, some vocal modes were made that we removed before the final version:

For SAROS, we took out 2 modes before their final version - “Mellow” and “Solid”. Both were redundant modes - “Mellow” worked like a less effective “Gentle” or “Soft” and “Solid” like a less useful “Power”.

NYL had 5 modes removed for the final version - usually we don’t end up with this many extra, but most of these were experiments based on a very small amount of data, or alternates for other modes we ended up keeping. One of the latter type of modes was “Belt”, a tone that sits somewhere between their final “Power” and “Solid” modes - since it was somewhere between these two, it could roughly be achieved by using “Power” and “Solid” together at 50% each, and so was not a reasonable mode to keep. We also removed test modes “Resonant” and “Bright” for this reason. The other type of modes we took out were experiments that just didn’t pay off - “Nasal” and “Rough”, both which had very little effect.

For ASTERIAN, the reverse happened: we were able to add two new modes near the end of development! We’ve seen speculation that this was done through adding new recordings over the development period, but in actuality all of our voices are only shown off once full recordings are implemented. (SAROS is an exception here, as Spanish recordings could not be implemented until the language framework was ready.) In actuality, we just went back and combed through the samples after discussing some unique tones we heard in Eric Hollaway’s original recordings, and identified enough samples to create two additional modes: “Rough” and “Closed” (which was originally named “Moody”). These two modes were a bit before their time, as they are much better suited to parameter editing than being applied to a whole note group at once. However, parameter editing for vocal modes was not available when ASTERIAN first released.

Character Design

While the focus of our vocals is, of course, their voices, we put in quite a bit of work during the design process to bring out the charms of their tone.

Naming & Themes

Some of our vocals went through quite a few name changes before settling on their final names. For instance, while many users may know SOLARIA’s original name during our crowdfund was “SOLARIS”, you may not know that her original concept name, before we even pitched her as a project, was “CORONA” - after the outer ring of the sun visible during a total eclipse. This was changed for obvious, urgent reasons. SOLARIA’s name was changed from “SOLARIS” to help her stand out a bit more with a more unique name, as well as to make her name more feminine to suit her vocal tone. SOLARIA is conceptualized as a confident woman, and we usually use she/her for this vocal.

Based on that, you might be able to guess ASTERIAN’s original name - “UMBRA”, after the shadow in an eclipse. Unlike SOLARIA’s original name, UMBRA was more of a codename rather than the name we wanted to use as final for ASTERIAN - while the two of them may make an eclipse together, it would be a shame for their names to not let them stand on their own! We went through a number of other names for ASTERIAN during the process - the forced-feeling “LUNARION”, the missing-the-core-of-it “APHELION”, and the close-but-not-quite “OBERON.” When we came up with the name ASTERIAN, we just knew it suited him better than the others. The name ASTERIAN doesn’t have a direct moon link, meaning “of the stars”, but we thought it suited the feeling of looking up at the moon at night quite well - a focus among the stars. ASTERIAN’s name was also chosen for its strong masculine sound which suited both the character and vocal extremely well - we generally use he/him for ASTERIAN. 

SAROS’ name also does not have a direct link to their theme, being based on the “Saros Cycle”, which describes the timing of eclipses. We wanted to invoke the idea of our series drawing nearer to completion with their name, and feel like it really captured their essence from initial concept. Additionally, SAROS was conceptualized as a genderfluid nonbinary character, especially with their role as a flexible tenor vocalist. While we originally wanted to express this with mixed pronoun usage, we were worried that users would likely just pick a specific set or become easily confused, so we chose to stick with they/elle for SAROS.

NYL’s name was decided upon quickly - a mix of “nil”, meaning zero, and “nyx”, meaning night. We were aiming for a portmanteau that approximated the idea of the void of space without using an existing word in order to help them stand out more. NYL is meant to be an alto vocalist that fills the space between our other vocals to bring the group together cohesively, meaning that void was the perfect theme for them, as the finishing touch to the series. NYL was conceptualized as an agender character and always was intended to use they/them pronouns.  

Color Selection

Our group as a whole uses a fantasy space theme, with each member of the Starry Court focused on an aspect of the sky as seen from Earth - sun, moon, stars, and void - but the colors decided on for each vocal are also important to this theme. Specifically, the usage of gold in each design rather than switching metals or eschewing them altogether was important to show that all members of the court are equal in standing. We especially wanted to make this clear with the transition from SOLARIA to ASTERIAN on his release, that all of these vocals would maintain our attention and focus over time. While this was maybe a bit confusing at the time, we think that it makes perfect sense now especially when we are about to move forward with a new series of vocals - as the gold color to us indicates that these vocals will always be our core lineup.

The Starry Court's Future

While this series has no planned vocals in the future, we do plan on continuing to develop promotional content for these vocals going forward since they are our core series, albeit not at the rate done during development. 

Future Events

SAROS and NYL will both receive Eclipsed Design and Original Song Contests in the future, as well as Lite voice database releases coinciding with their song contests. We intended for these to happen earlier, but NYL’s release took precedent.

Future Merchandise

While we are and will remain a vocal-focused company, we are still planning on the release of SOLARIA’s “SUNDIAL” anniversary album. There has been a long delay due to internal complications with the release of the album, team changes, and development challenges with our vocals, but we still hope you will look forward to new information on this soon. As for other merchandise of our vocals outside of the physical editions, we aren’t confident that there is sufficient demand to justify its creation with regard to the necessary time commitment and company funds. If you are interested in anything of this variety, please reach out via our contact form.

Community Questions

While we tried to include answers to many questions in our retrospective, some questions did not fit easily into the flow and are answered directly below.

Future Activities

• While we do not have any plans to add additional vocal modes or pursue merchandise out of what was mentioned in our piece above, we do intend to keep promoting the Starry Court vocals into the future, as they will remain our central lineup even after Phase 2 begins.

• We firmly believe that Synthesizer V Studio is the home of the Starry Court. We have worked closely with Dreamtonics on the development of each vocal, including accommodations made to the engine itself for our voices. We are also glad that on Synthesizer V Studio, users can try out the Starry Court completely for free (once all Lite voice databases are released). We truly do not believe there is any engine that would provide similar accommodations for SOLARIA, ASTERIAN, SAROS and NYL, and are deeply grateful for Dreamtonics’ collaboration in helping our Court shine as intended. 

• Our apologies, for the time being these standees are only available with the physical editions. We aren’t sure of the demand for standalone merchandise, so please reach out via our contact form if you are looking for these items.

• More than in-mind, we have projects actively in development for our next series - currently referred to as “Phase 2”. Please look forward to when we can announce them!

Development

Casting

• While we did not fully hold open auditions, each voice provider really just wowed us instantly - which goes for SOLARIA’s as well! There was just something unique about each of their tones that we noticed while looking for singers, we think our users should understand that as well since those tones are also what drew you to them as virtual vocals!

• SAROS’ voice provider opted to remain anonymous due to conflict between their primary performing brand and their existence as a virtual singer. We ask earnestly that our users please respect their desire for privacy! We have been sharing SAROS works with the voice provider and they have quite enjoyed seeing all of the works created with their voice.

Planning

• While the Starry Court came together naturally over time, each type/range was part of the concept for each vocal from the start. We wanted to make sure that if we were focusing on genre-flexible voices that they would naturally stay out of each others’ niche.

• We had a general idea with each vocal - a flexible pop-leaning mezzo-soprano, a resonant and supported bass, a bright and powerful tenor, and a warm, strong alto - but we kept our concepts flexible so that when the right vocalist came, we wouldn’t miss our opportunity.

• We did scout each vocal with a specific range in mind - just because that is the whole concept of the group! In the future we will be scouting with specific genre skills in mind. (If you are or know a vocalist with skill in a particular genre- please feel free to reach out!)

• We aimed for Synthesizer V’s evaluation version before the announcement of Synthesizer V Studio, just like we aimed to develop a Standard voice database before the announcement of AI, but did consider that other engines could be a back-up. However, Synthesizer V in any of its forms was always our goal. 

• It was a little bit of both to get to this point - our original loose group concept prior to any real development did not actually involve NYL, and just involved SOLARIA, ASTERIAN, and SAROS as a trio. However, as we moved forward with development and casting, it became obvious to us that we needed a fourth to truly accomplish what we set out to do. At that point we made decisions to break the group into more natural duos - however, we wanted to see our vocals work as duos in any configuration - all of the possible duos work just as well from our perspective! Visually and thematically however, we did design SOLARIA & ASTERIAN and NYL & SAROS to mirror each other more than the others.

• On the whole, we wanted to make it easier to make vocal music for any range! We see our singers as excellent lead vocalists, but even more so we view them as tools that make music production easier for everyone. Even if a lot of songs using them are drafts that are meant for other singers, we are just happy to have played a part in the process. We know that, especially for deeper feminine and masculine vocal ranges, there had been a lack of access to vocal tools suitable for drafting, reference, and experimentation purposes. Our other goal was to fulfill the needs expressed by the existing vocal synthesis userbase, which all of our core team members, past and present, had come from. If you look at our Starry Court lineup, this should be obvious - a power-driven feminine vocal, two strong and expressive androgynous-leaning vocals, and a true bass vocal for possibly the first time in commercial English synthesis. All of these were requests we had seen for years in the vocal synthesis space. We really hope that our singers have at least partially satisfied those needs!

Recording

• All of our vocals have just about the same amount of data, but SOLARIA has the least by a few minutes. SAROS is an exception, as they have an entire set of Spanish language recordings on top of their English recordings, making them our largest voice database by far. 

• We make unique sets of recording requirements for each of our vocalists. Our first recording project - SOLARIA’s test voice for the crowdfund, was made with a recording list provided by Dreamtonics, since she was a test as a Standard-style voice database. For the rest of our vocals, including SOLARIA’s full version, we created the recording corpus ourselves in collaboration with our singers in consideration of each of their unique skills. All of our vocals have unique data that helps them express the tones we were targeting from our voice providers. 

Vocal Modes

• We identify the vocal modes after all recording has been completed. At this stage, we do all of the audio cleaning, processing, and data annotation work necessary to create the voice database. After that is complete, we examine all of the recorded data to identify vocal modes, and pull the modes directly from the original recordings instead of recording specifically for vocal modes. Isolation of vocal mode tones is often achieved through a great deal of manual work on our end during the audio cleaning process before any data annotation work is done.

Character 

• We intended the Starry Court to be less literal than a magic legislative body or monarchy - with the concept drawing more from the imagery of royalty portrayed by the characters as a whole. We wanted to evoke the idea of their natural existence pertaining to things like maintaining the cycle of eclipses, times of day, and the phases of the moon, as well as other natural stellar cycles. This theme was meant to evoke the idea of these vocals being a dependable mainstay in a user’s library - just as sure as the sun will rise, SOLARIA will always be there if you need her voice.

• We had a few intentions behind these choices. The first was to make the flexibility of these vocals clear from even just the way they were referred to. At the core we are a vocal-focused company, so every decision we make about our vocals’ branding comes back to the voice itself at some point. Other considerations we had were the identities of the voice providers themselves, the identities of our team members, representation for a largely queer userbase, and just general fit with the concept of the vocals on the whole. 

• While we had discussed this, we originally dropped the weapon idea as we didn’t want the Starry Court to come off as a hostile bunch, so you could say archery is more of SOLARIA’s hobby than a means of self defense. Otherwise, taking the question more directly, Brielle and Elijah said they would imagine some form of staff or shield for ASTERIAN, a sword for SAROS, and some sort of magical weapon or focus like a crystal ball for NYL.

• We see them all as taller than average - but probably not absurdly so! NYL is also meant to be the shortest of the group - a fun contrast with their theme’s vastness compared to the themes of the other vocals.

• The Starry Court look was truly and utterly based on SOLARIA’s design process, which was contributed to by our entire team but lead by our former team member Niamh Easter. Since we began with a single vocal with no other plans, when we worked on ASTERIAN we built his design to mirror hers. I was ASTERIAN’s lead designer, and so he was built to mirror SOLARIA entirely, from the balance of color in his design to the metalwork and color choice itself. SAROS and NYL were both designed to fit in with the group but bring their own feel as well. We could share more about this process in a future post if there is interest, so please let us know!

• Our company’s name actually precedes development of our vocals, as it was a pre-existing LLC created by Elijah Damon, our founder. We based the theme of the vocals off of the name of the company, but iterated on it until we felt happy with the synergy. We opted to base the Starry Court on more general concepts rather than distinct stellar bodies or a solar system theme, which we believe shows quite a bit as we moved through the series. We felt that more generalized themes, like “sun, moon, stars, and void”, carried more weight and provided more opportunity for the vocals themselves than specific planets or stellar bodies. For example, ASTERIAN’s theme is “moon”, but there are many moons in the cosmos - he represents the concept of a moon itself, not just our moon.

• Our original goal with character settings was to leave it up to interpretation, as we saw that as more desirable for producers and artists to work with. However, we do see the comics provided by Rice (@rice_deity on Twitter) as somewhat representative of their personalities, albeit to an exaggerated extent. Other than that, we see all four characters as adults and other than their themes, do not have established lore. However, we may have some interesting surprises coming in the far future for those who would like to have lore for our vocals…

General

• It was a crazy moment! I woke up in the middle of the night and checked the email and an email from a SEGA email address was submitted in our contact form, trying to make sure it was alright to add the song to the game since SOLARIA was included in it. We were more shocked that we were asked - but it was exciting regardless. We are very grateful to iyowa for using SOLARIA in such an amazing song!

• Our current team members each have their own favorites: Brielle’s favorite is ASTERIAN, Elijah’s favorite is SOLARIA, and I’m partial to NYL right now. But, when we discuss them as a whole team, ASTERIAN tends to be our collective favorite.

• SOLARIA - [s ax l aa r iy ah]
• ASTERIAN - [ax s t eh r iy ih n]
• SAROS - [s aa r ow s]
• NYL - [n ih l]

• The real highlights for our team was watching everyone’s amazing work come to life, and the community that uses them! Your support is the most important thing to us.

Additionally, before I end things, I just wanted to thank our former team member Niamh Easter for all of their hard work before leaving the team earlier this month. Niamh was with us from the start and really helped make the Starry Court what it was! We’ll miss them going forward but wish them the best of luck in all endeavors. 

Thank you all for your support of Eclipsed Sounds’ vocalists. We hope you’ll continue to look forward to what we have in store - 2025 will be a big year for us as we move away from solely focusing on the Starry Court. For now- we’ll keep giving it our best efforts to close out 2024 with our remaining team of 3!