Sebastien GulluniExpressive Sound Designer
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The sound you can hear but can’t find.

I make custom expressive sounds for story-driven composers.

Five expressive sound examples

Five sounds, each built around a different playing gesture: pressure, glide, bend. Three of them come back in the cue further down.

Textured Pad Zebra 3 Pressure thickens the texture. More harmonics, more grit, the further you lean in.
Origins Lead The Legend HZ · played on an Erae 2 Pressure opens and colours the tone. Most of the expression comes from the natural glide between notes.
Hybrid Pluck Zebra 3 An imaginary plucked instrument. Resonators shape the attack, pressure holds the sustain, and the Osmose keys bend the pitch.
Layered Bass The Legend HZ + Zebra 3 · played on an Erae 2 Weight from the low end of the Legend HZ layer, harmonic detail from the Zebra layer, both tracking pressure. Glide between notes throughout.
Expressive Pulses Zebra 3 Each voice carries its own pulse, and each one evolves under the pressure of its own key.
Three of them, in a cue

A New Era. The lead, pulse and bass in a hybrid demo track I wrote. It opens on the pulse you just heard. It leans further towards electronics than a typical orchestral cue would: it’s here to show how these sounds behave inside an arrangement.

How it works
  1. Tell me what you need. Words are usually the best start: the scene, the character, what the sound has to do in the story. A reference track or a work-in-progress version of your cue helps too, if you have one.
  2. I make it. You get a first pass with two or three directions to react to, rather than one finished sound. Usually within a week or two, depending on scope. Tell me your deadline and I’ll say straight away whether it’s realistic.
  3. We adjust together. That’s where it actually gets right.
  4. It’s yours. Whatever I make for you stays yours. It doesn’t go into a library, it isn’t reused on someone else’s project, and it never gets released. It exists for your score and nowhere else.
What you get
A custom patch, or a small palette of sounds Built around your project and ready to load in the instrument you already write in.
MPE-ready, no MPE hardware required On a monophonic sound the expression maps to the mod wheel, and it plays on any keyboard you own. What MPE adds is bend and expression on every note inside a chord, which is what these sounds are built around. If you do have an MPE controller, tell me which one and I’ll design the patch for it.
If you don’t have the synth Send me your part, I’ll perform it on the sound, and you get the audio and the MIDI back.
Zebra 2ZebraHZZebra 3DivaHive 2Serum 2PigmentsOmnispherePhase PlantDune 3The Legend HZVitalNative Instruments

Most of these carry commercial banks I designed. Zebra is often a good starting point: modular, and it covers a lot of ground in one instrument. Not on the list? Getting properly inside a new synth takes me about a day, and on a custom job that is worth doing.

Priced per sound or per day, depending on scope. Tell me what you need and I’ll come back with a number.

About

I’m an independent sound designer and musician based in Paris. For over a decade I’ve made expressive, playable presets for synth makers and sample libraries: 900+ MPE presets for Expressive E, Kontakt programming for 8Dio’s Century Strings, Century Brass and Strings Anthology, plus Embodme, Noiiz and others. Alongside that I compose for music libraries, independent games and short films.

A scene can turn on a single sound. What matters to me is how that sound sits in the music: the character of it, and how it plays. The presets come gesture-ready (MPE) and drop straight into a cue, so you spend the session writing, not building patches.

I make the sound. You write the music. If you want, I’ll play your line on it.

BackgroundAlongside the music, I came up through the research side. I did my PhD in music information retrieval at INA GRM, after a master’s in acoustics, signal processing and computer science applied to music at IRCAM. I have been teaching sound synthesis and sound processing since 2010.