Soundmorph's steampunk sound design

[ytensor]

This pack from Soundmorph features sounds that on top of using field recordings for tonality and texture, employ some pretty intricate liquidy lasery layers for transients and cool morphing parts. How do people suspect these sounds could have been made? They all sit in the same sonic ballpark so I have to imagine there's a reproducible technique employed here.

There are qualities typical of vocoders in some parts but at the same time they don't sound like they're quite that. I'd suggest something spectral since pretty much all complex sound design points back to that area but there aren't really any giveaway fft artefacts so I doubt that's what we're looking for. I imagine it's probably simpler than I'm making it out to be. What do we think? Noteworthy places include 0:36 and 1:17 in this demo.

[Dirtgrain]

Maybe the laser-like shots are in part from modulating fast pitch changes with an envelope (is where I'd start).