XLN Audio’s Life brilliantly transforms the world into a drum kitSick of sample libraries? Bored of generic beats? The inspiration you’ve been looking for, it turns out, might just be hidden in the squeak of a hallway door, the beep of a crossing light, or the hum of a refrigerator. This is the premise behind Life, the new release from Sweden-based developer XLN Audio, creator of the revered RC-20 Retro Colour lo-fi plugin. Life comes with the promise to make personalised percussion out of everyday noise.

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The idea that anything can be music is nothing new; using non-musical sounds as drum samples is a well-worn production trick. What makes Life special is not necessarily the end result – it’s how, and how fast, you get there.

The basic premise is this: using the Life Field Recorder mobile app for iOS and Android, you can go out and capture any noise that piques your interest. You upload the recordings to your XLN account and seamlessly sync to the Life desktop app or DAW plugin. Once there, the recordings you’ve gathered are automatically analysed for salient audio features and, based on this analysis, the file is neatly sliced into segments. But that’s not all; the app ingeniously generates dozens of rhythmic patterns to accompany your new sample instrument.
The whole process of analysing the source file and generating rhythmic patterns takes roughly three seconds on our M2 Macbook Air, and the results are genuinely awesome.
The sound of some street Karaoke in Vietnam becomes a perfect starting point for an EDM track, and rolling the dice to get a second variation lands on something closer to industrial techno. The chugging sound of a washing machine is transformed first into a lazy hip-hop beat, and then into something hard to quantify but enjoyable nonetheless