Uploaded May 2020 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

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FluCoMa instigator Pierre Alexandre Tremblay describes his creative interactions with the first FluCoMa Toolbox throughout its design over more than 2 years, how it shaped his research, and how they underpinned his latest work (un)weave for Wet Ink Ensemble, premiered at hcmf// 2019.

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Ben Hackbarth’s AudioGuide software (referred to at 8:42) is available here: benhackbarth.com/audioGuide

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

You know him as an electroacoustic musician, but you discover he’s into contemporary jazz. He’s a consumate improviser but few know he’s also a studio musician. You think you’ve pegged him as a lecturer and then discover that he’s a producer. He’s played bass guitar forever, but is equally happy playing the laptop.

Pierre Alexandre Tremblay is never quite where you expect to find him. Each of his activities is influenced by the others and he loves that this shapes his creativity infinitely, keeping him from always staying in one place.

Québécois by birth and by temperament, Pierre Alexandre has been teaching composition and improvisation at the University of Huddersfield in England since 2005. He has also collaborated on a variety of projects, playing bass guitar and manipulating sound.

He is a member of ars circa musicæ (from noise to free jazz, punk rock and contemporary music), and de type inconnu (a two-guitar and two-laptop duet).

Pierre Alexandre Tremblay follows many paths to the same end: the hybridization of his various musical influences into a single, coherent poetic language.


/// 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.