Vestral Voices is a cinematic vocal instrument from Occult Audio built around the contrast between beauty and unease. Recorded inside the reverberant stone walls of St Michael’s Church, its vocal material retains the natural reflections, resonance, and decay of the space.

Rather than focusing on conventional vocal performance, Vestral Voices is designed for atmosphere, tension, emotional weight, cinematic scoring, sound design, ambient music, and horror composition.

Light and Dark Vocal Worlds

The instrument is divided into two complementary collections.

Light presents the recorded voices in an intimate, breath-filled, and reverent form. These performances provide delicate choral textures with the natural character of the original recordings.

Dark takes the same type of vocal material into more processed territory. Degradation, reconstruction, and manipulation turn the voices into distant, fractured, and increasingly unnatural sounds.

This contrast allows the instrument to move between subtle vocal atmosphere and more unsettling cinematic textures.

Sustains, Drones, and Textures

Vestral Voices contains three main types of source material:

• Sustains — held vocal performances with breath, movement, and harmonic detail.
• Drones — long-form evolving layers designed for tension and atmosphere.
• Textures — reversed, manipulated, and reconstructed vocal performances that develop into broad ambient and tonal soundscapes.

Both Light and Dark collections include an extended usable pitch range.

Granular Engine

The updated version introduces a granular engine that opens the vocal recordings up to real-time manipulation. Parameters include grain size, density, detune, pitch, position, and spread, with an envelope plus dedicated reverb and delay.

Instead of being limited to the original recordings, users can transform the source material into evolving granular textures directly inside the instrument.

Movement System

The new Movement system provides a continuous blend between the original sample playback and the granular engine. This makes it possible to move from an untouched vocal recording toward a heavily granulated texture.

Movement can be controlled manually or through the instrument's onboard motion control, making it suitable for evolving sound beds and dynamic cinematic transitions.

Reverb and Sound Shaping

Vestral Voices includes a custom reverb collection with newly added convolution impulse responses. These provide additional spaces ranging from intimate environments to larger cinematic settings.

Further processing is available through Drive and Tone controls, filtering, and dynamics processing. Together with the granular and Movement systems, these tools provide several stages of transformation for the original vocal material.

Presets and Included Content

The updated instrument includes a new preset library specifically designed around the granular and Movement engines, while retaining the existing presets.

The package includes:

• Light and Dark vocal collections
• Extended pitch range
• Sustains, drones, and evolving textures
• Recordings captured inside St Michael’s Church
• Granular engine
• Movement blending system
• Custom reverb collection
• New convolution impulse responses
• Drive and Tone controls
• Filtering and dynamics processing
• New preset library
• Original Kontakt library

Plugin Formats

Vestral Voices is now available as a standalone VST3 and AU instrument, meaning the updated version does not require additional software.

The original Kontakt library is also included for users who prefer that format. The Kontakt version requires the full version of Kontakt 6.0.8 or later; Kontakt Player is not supported.

Existing owners of Vestral Voices and Vestral Voices: Rebirth receive the update free through the Pulse downloader.