A Collaboration Across Cloudtops: Recording My Daughter's Voice

One of the unexpected gifts of the pandemic was the chance to slow down and fully experience the early years of fatherhood. My daughter was three years old at the time, and while the outside world was tangled in uncertainty, our home became a sanctuary filled with stories, laughter, and imagination. Bedtime, in particular, took on a magical quality. I began reading to her every night—tales of fairies, princesses, and faraway places. Eventually I began inventing stories of my own, which ended up being the first seeds of Once Upon a Cloudtop Meadow.

I have previously written about how musical form can serve as a storytelling tool—a kind of map that guides listeners through familiar and unfamiliar soundscapes. You can explore that topic further in the post titled Mapping the Invisible: Understanding Form in Music. I also shared insights into how I used sampled instruments to approximate the scale of a large orchestra, blending them with toy instruments to conjure surreal, enchanting textures—detailed in the post My Journey Into Sample Libraries. In another post, I explained how I turned the acoustics of her bedroom into an impulse response reverb, giving the entire album a subtle but unique sonic fingerprint. Feel free to explore those if you're curious about the broader soundworld of this album.

In this post, I want to explore another deeply personal element: how I recorded, sampled, and reimagined my daughter’s voice in different forms—from storytelling to percussive elements—to bring our shared fantasy world to life.

Unscripted Dialogues and Storytelling

During the album’s production, I often found myself recording my daughter speaking, playing, and storytelling. I would ask her to tell a story—without any script—and let her imagination lead the way. Because she had been hearing my bedtime tales of Lulu and Cloudman every night, she began to absorb and reinterpret those narratives. Her retellings were sometimes faithful, sometimes wildly unexpected.

For example, the album’s opening line—"Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess, and her name was Luna"—was entirely her invention. In my stories, Luna was never a princess! But in her version, she claimed the narrative with total authority!

In another recording, she described a dream that took a sudden dark turn: “And then... the cat died.” There was a pause, and then she exclaimed, "Huh! This is a very scary tale. I'm going to have nightmares tonight!" The entire segment was spontaneous and surreal—exactly the kind of stuff I wanted in the album.

Occasionally, I’d gently direct her. For the track Meet Cloudman, I asked her, "What is the first thing Lulu does when she reaches the clouds?" Without missing a beat, she replied, "Cloudman, where are you!?" It was pure storytelling magic.

For the track Ellipsis, I reached even further back—to a recording from when she was under a year old. In it, just before drifting away to sleep, she tried forming words like “Baba” (meaning “father” in Turkish). You can hear her searching for language, touching its surface. These tiny phonetic explorations felt like a glimpse into consciousness forming—and for a first-time parent, it was nothing short of miraculous.

I extensively recorded these moments—some silly, some poetic... Later, I combed through the material, carefully selecting fragments that would enrich the album’s world—not just narratively, but texturally. Sometimes her voice helped push the story forward. Other times, it existed simply as a gentle echo of childhood wonder.

Multi-layered Vocal Sampling

Beyond storytelling, I also set out to sample her voice—treating her voice as a sampled instrument, layered into choral textures.

My goal was modest: to record her singing a simple vowel, the “A” sound, across a chromatic range. Over several sessions (and many playful detours), we managed to capture clean recordings of her singing from B3 to G4. The results weren’t pristine, fluctuations in tone—but they were authentic and full of character.

With those notes in hand, I created a mini vocal instrument using the TAL Sampler. I then used this sample-based "choir" in multiple tracks. You can hear it in the middle choral section of Meet Cloudman, and again during the final ascent in Lulu’s Theme. The notes aren’t perfect, but that was never the goal. They shimmer with the fragile texture of a child’s voice—something no sample library can truly replicate.

This technique mirrors what I discussed in an earlier blog post about creating custom sample libraries: recording each note individually, then mapping them to a MIDI keyboard so they can be played like an instrument. In this case, the instrument was deeply personal, and the result was more emotionally resonant than I had anticipated.

Traditional Vocal Recording

As my daughter grew, her vocal control improved—and so did our musical possibilities. One standout example is in the track K’yango’s Lament. By this time, she was around five or six years old, and we were able to record her singing short melodic fragments for the piece.

Her natural intonation was surprisingly close, but I did use Melodyne to gently adjust the tuning—just enough to blend with the orchestral layers while preserving her authentic tone. I wanted her voice to sit naturally in the mix, unpolished but expressive.

In the final climactic moments of K’yango’s Lament, you can hear her voice rising with the ensemble, not as a novelty, but as an emotional core. It felt like the right culmination for our collaboration—a child's voice singing from within a world we had imagined together.

Percussive Voice Elements

Finally, I explored using her voice in a more abstract, percussive way. While sifting through all our recordings, I started extracting short bursts of sound—"Ahs", "Das", tiny giggles, and expressive gasps.

These one-shot samples were then loaded into TAL Drum, a sampler designed for triggering percussive hits. The result was a bank of quirky, organic vocal percussion that I used in the track A is for “Aga”. It added a playful, restless energy that perfectly matched the track’s theme—a musical portrait of a child resisting bedtime, full of chaotic joy and refusal to sleep.

Incorporating my daughter’s voice into Once Upon a Cloudtop Meadow was not just a technical exercise—it was a way to honor and preserve a fleeting, magical chapter in both our lives. Her voice exists in the album not only as sound, but as memory. Each whisper, each vowel, each bedtime story fragment is a sonic artifact of a world we built together during those quiet nights.

This album may carry my name as its composer, but its heart belongs to us both.