I’m excited to share Unheard Voices, a new sample library for Decent Sampler created in collaboration with Foundational Audio, a boutique sample library company based in Pennsylvania.

Foundational Audio was founded by Liam Turnage, a former student of mine at West Chester University, and it’s been a real pleasure to watch him launch his own company and work alongside him as a creative partner. Together we designed a custom sample playback engine for Decent Sampler that combines looping and single-shot playback, giving players a flexible way to build sounds and textures drawn from the natural world.

The library is built on the recordings I made and developed for my 2021 sound installation, Unheard Voices: The Embodied and Networked Intelligence of Plants. That work reflected on plant perception, memory, and communication through underground mycorrhizal networks. In it, plants native to Arizona, including cactus, trees, pinecones, seedpods, branches, and leaves, were plucked, strummed, bowed, shaken, and touched as musical instruments, and their sounds were broadcast through speaker-equipped microcomputers hidden in the trees and terra-cotta pots in the ASU Secret Garden.

With this release, those sounds are now open to composers, producers, and sound designers who want to bring the voices of plants and environments into their own work. The library is organized into two presets, each with its own distinct character, featuring field recordings alongside processed drones, pulses, and textures. Every key triggers a different sample, and built-in loop, pitch, and modulated effects controls let you shape each sound as a playable instrument.

My hope with the original installation was to encourage listeners to hear plants not as background, but as living, sensing participants in an interconnected world.

Unheard Voices is available now for $30 USD from Foundational Audio and on Gumroad.