FluCoMa Plenary: Richard Devine

Richard Devine discusses his work in creative sound design with analogue and digital electronics over the course of his career

http://www.flucoma.org/
http://www.devinesound.net/
http://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

Richard Devine is an Atlanta-based electronic musician and sound designer, currently employed by Google. He is recognized for producing a layered and heavily processed sound, combining influences from glitch music to old and modern electronic music.

Devine largely records for the Miami-based Schematic Records, which was founded by Josh Kay of Phoenecia. He has also done extensive recording and sample work with Josh Kay under the name DEVSND. As a result of praise of his music from Autechre as well as a remix of Aphex Twin's Come To Daddy, Devine recorded an album for Warp Records which was jointly released by Schematic and Warp. Devine has designed sound patches for Propellerhead's Reason, NI’s Absynth, Reaktor, Battery and Massive, along with providing sound patches to Moog Music's award-winning Animoog app. He has also scored commercials for Nike, Touchstone Pictures and engineered and performed his own music worldwide. Though he has contributed sound design to a number of hardware and software manufacturers, he recently released his first official sample library through Sony Creative Software entitled The Electronic Music Manuscript: A Richard Devine Collection.


/// 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.