Uploaded June 2019 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Hans Tutschku discusses his use of Max/MSP and audio corpus manipulation to navigate large sound libraries at the first FluCoMa Plenary
flucoma.org
tutschku.com
cerenem.org
The first FluCoMa plenary saw the eight creative coders involved in the early testing and refinement of the FluCoMa toolboxes, as well as two external specialists and the project team, come together for three days of discussion, brainstorming, and critical engagement with the FluCoMa project. As a part of this, each participant was asked to present an element of their techno-fluent practice in depth: a recent creative technological usage that would be inspiring, clever, and subversive.
/// CREDITS
Video camera operator: Andie Brown, James Bradbury, Jacob Hart, and Sam Gillies
Video edited by Jacob Hart and Sam Gillies
Audio edited by Pierre Alexandre Tremblay
FluCoMa video bumper by Angela Guyton
Recorded September 20-22, 2018, University of Huddersfield
/// BIOGRAPHY
Hans Tutschku (1966) is a composer of instrumental and electroacoustic music. He has furthermore collaborated in film, theatre and dance productions. In 1982 he joined the “Ensemble for intuitive music Weimar” and later studied theatre and composition in Berlin, Dresden, The Hague, Paris, and Birmingham, as well as participated in concert cycles with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Improvisation with electronics has been a core activity over the past 35 years in many different collaborative projects.
He has been working as composition professor and director of the electroacoustic studios at Harvard University since 2004.
He is the winner of many international competitions, among others:
Hanns Eisler Preis, Bourges, CIMESP Sao Paulo, Prix Ars Electronica, Prix Noroit, Prix Musica Nova, ZKM Giga-Hertz, CIME ICEM and Klang! In 2005 he received the culture prize of the city of Weimar.
Besides his regular courses at the university, he has taught international workshops for musicians and non-musicians on aspects of art appreciation, listening, creativity, composition, improvisation, live-electronics, and sound spatialization in more than 20 countries.
/// FluCoMa
The Fluid Corpus Manipulation project (FluCoMA) instigates new musical ways of exploiting ever-growing banks of sound and gestures within the digital composition process, by bringing breakthroughs of signal decomposition DSP and machine learning to the toolset of techno-fluent computer composers, creative coders and digital artists.
These potent algorithms are currently partially available in closed bespoke software, or in laboratories, but not at a suitable level of modularity within the main coding environments used by the creative researchers, namely Max, Pd and SuperCollider, to allow groundbreaking sonic research into a rich unexploited area: the manipulation of large sound corpora. Indeed, with access to, genesis of, and storage of large sound banks now commonplace, novel ways of abstracting and manipulating them are needed to mine their inherent potential.
FluCoMa proposes to tackle this issue by empowering techno-fluent aesthetic researchers with a toolset for signal decomposition, and one for machine learning, as well as support material, in order to experiment with new sound and gesture design untapped in large corpora from within their high-level creative coding workflow. Three degrees of manipulations are set to be explored: (1) expressive browsing and descriptor-based taxonomy, (2) remixing, component replacement, and hybridisation by concatenation, and (3) pattern recognition at component level, with interpolating and variation-making potential. These novel manipulations will yield new sounds, new musical ideas, and new approaches to large corpora.
As with previous HISS projects, FluCoMa will deliver its findings open source, in the form of software (standalone and extensions) with extensive documentation and examples, as well as the underlying libraries in C++. Moreover, musical works commissioned to challenge these new methodologies will be released, through concerts and plenaries on surrounding subjects, and documented in academic papers. A users forum will also be at the centre of this emerging research community.
FluCoMa is based within the Department of Music and Music Technology, with its Centre for Research in New Music, on the Queensgate Campus of the University of Huddersfield. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 725899.
Hans Tutschku discusses his use of Max/MSP and audio corpus manipulation to navigate large sound libraries at the first FluCoMa Plenary
flucoma.org
tutschku.com
cerenem.org
The first FluCoMa plenary saw the eight creative coders involved in the early testing and refinement of the FluCoMa toolboxes, as well as two external specialists and the project team, come together for three days of discussion, brainstorming, and critical engagement with the FluCoMa project. As a part of this, each participant was asked to present an element of their techno-fluent practice in depth: a recent creative technological usage that would be inspiring, clever, and subversive.
/// CREDITS
Video camera operator: Andie Brown, James Bradbury, Jacob Hart, and Sam Gillies
Video edited by Jacob Hart and Sam Gillies
Audio edited by Pierre Alexandre Tremblay
FluCoMa video bumper by Angela Guyton
Recorded September 20-22, 2018, University of Huddersfield
/// BIOGRAPHY
Hans Tutschku (1966) is a composer of instrumental and electroacoustic music. He has furthermore collaborated in film, theatre and dance productions. In 1982 he joined the “Ensemble for intuitive music Weimar” and later studied theatre and composition in Berlin, Dresden, The Hague, Paris, and Birmingham, as well as participated in concert cycles with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Improvisation with electronics has been a core activity over the past 35 years in many different collaborative projects.
He has been working as composition professor and director of the electroacoustic studios at Harvard University since 2004.
He is the winner of many international competitions, among others:
Hanns Eisler Preis, Bourges, CIMESP Sao Paulo, Prix Ars Electronica, Prix Noroit, Prix Musica Nova, ZKM Giga-Hertz, CIME ICEM and Klang! In 2005 he received the culture prize of the city of Weimar.
Besides his regular courses at the university, he has taught international workshops for musicians and non-musicians on aspects of art appreciation, listening, creativity, composition, improvisation, live-electronics, and sound spatialization in more than 20 countries.
/// FluCoMa
The Fluid Corpus Manipulation project (FluCoMA) instigates new musical ways of exploiting ever-growing banks of sound and gestures within the digital composition process, by bringing breakthroughs of signal decomposition DSP and machine learning to the toolset of techno-fluent computer composers, creative coders and digital artists.
These potent algorithms are currently partially available in closed bespoke software, or in laboratories, but not at a suitable level of modularity within the main coding environments used by the creative researchers, namely Max, Pd and SuperCollider, to allow groundbreaking sonic research into a rich unexploited area: the manipulation of large sound corpora. Indeed, with access to, genesis of, and storage of large sound banks now commonplace, novel ways of abstracting and manipulating them are needed to mine their inherent potential.
FluCoMa proposes to tackle this issue by empowering techno-fluent aesthetic researchers with a toolset for signal decomposition, and one for machine learning, as well as support material, in order to experiment with new sound and gesture design untapped in large corpora from within their high-level creative coding workflow. Three degrees of manipulations are set to be explored: (1) expressive browsing and descriptor-based taxonomy, (2) remixing, component replacement, and hybridisation by concatenation, and (3) pattern recognition at component level, with interpolating and variation-making potential. These novel manipulations will yield new sounds, new musical ideas, and new approaches to large corpora.
As with previous HISS projects, FluCoMa will deliver its findings open source, in the form of software (standalone and extensions) with extensive documentation and examples, as well as the underlying libraries in C++. Moreover, musical works commissioned to challenge these new methodologies will be released, through concerts and plenaries on surrounding subjects, and documented in academic papers. A users forum will also be at the centre of this emerging research community.
FluCoMa is based within the Department of Music and Music Technology, with its Centre for Research in New Music, on the Queensgate Campus of the University of Huddersfield. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 725899.
