Uploaded June 2019 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

---

John Burton (aka Leafcutter John) discusses his gestural, light-controlled interfaces at the first FluCoMa Plenary

flucoma.org
leafcutterjohn.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

As part of his ongoing quest to create more expressive instruments with which to write and produce music John has designed, built and developed a unique light controlled musical interface which is the heart of his live show. Comprising a light sensitive controller and bespoke Max/MSP software which he plays gesturally using handheld lights. He has performed with it throughout Europe and given talks and workshops at various music and art schools, including the Royal College of Music. In 2012 he took this system to Vietnam at the invitation of the British Council and in 2014 played it to a sold-out Roundhouse in London supporting Imogen Heap. In 2015, the interface won the Qwartz Electronic Music Award for Innovation.

Since 2004 John has been a key member of experimental jazz band Polar Bear, recording five albums with them, picking up two prestigious Mercury Prize nominations. John has also performed with Shabaka Hutchings, Talvin Singh and Imogen Heap, supported Matmos, Otomo Yoshihide and Yo La Tengo and twice been part of Beck’s band at the Barbican, London.

Living up to his industrious artist name, John is also a prodigious producer and remixer. His production credits include Bas Jan and Melt Yourself Down and he’s currently working with Ed Dowie on his second solo album. Hes been commissioned to provide scores for countless theatre, dance and poetry luminaries, such as the Handspring Puppet Company and renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor. John has also written custom software for artists including Jon Hopkins (as used on his 2018 album Singularity) and experimental beat boxer Jason Singh.


/// 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.