Uploaded February 2020 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Lauren Hayes discusses the role the the FluCoMa toolset played in the creation of her work 'Moon via Spirit' at 'Reactive Flows' as part of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2019

Performance: youtube.com/watch?v=BzSRs_7S9cg

flucoma.org
pariesa.com
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The third FluCoMa plenary saw the 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 four days of discussion, brainstorming, and critical engagement with the FluCoMa project. The first toolbox, Fluid Decomposition, was released in a celebratory concert where the first cohort of critical users of the tools premiered their work. They are were asked to present the ‘traces of fluid decomposition’ in their piece, to see how the access to these new tools and technologies enabled new aesthetic endeavours.


/// CREDITS

Video camera operator: Sam Gillies
Edited by Sam Gillies
Some additional audio editing by Pierre Alexandre Tremblay
Assisted by Jacob Hart, James Bradbury, and Laurens van der Wee
FluCoMa video bumper by Angela Guyton

Recorded November 20, 2019, University of Huddersfield


/// BIOGRAPHY

Lauren Hayes is Assistant Professor of Sound Studies within the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University. She is a musician and sound artist with a decade of experience building and performing with hybrid analogue/digital instruments. Her research explores new strategies for live electronic music performance by investigating the performer's physical relationship with the digital realm through the lens of enactive and embodied music cognition, and performing with haptic and tangible interfaces. She also composes haptic music that can be experienced as vibration throughout the body and leads PARIESA (Practice and Research in Enactive Sonic Art) at ASU.


/// 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.