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Fluid Corpus Manipulation: Creative Research in Musical Mining of Large Sound/Gesture Datasets through Foundational Access to the Latest Advances of Signal Decomposition.

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - FluCoMa (Fluid Corpus Manipulation: Creative Research in Musical Mining of Large Sound/Gesture Datasets through Foundational Access to the Latest Advances of Signal Decomposition.)

Reporting period: 2020-09-01 to 2022-02-28

Cutting-edge musical composition has always been dependent on, critical and subversive of the latest advances of technology. This dependency allows a reciprocal enrichment: creative research makes critical and subversive uses of the latest advances of technological research, which then feeds back with new, divergent ideas. Unfortunately, there is a contemporary challenge inherent to aesthetic research in computer composition: an ever-expanding gap between digital signal processing (DSP) advances and their availability to musical investigators.

On the one hand, techno-fluent researchers are now well established in the field, and portable affordable computing devices are faster than ever. Moreover, never before has the creative community been so thriving: the age of digital sound production and its virtual web-based dissemination has helped many communities to grow around creative coding software in a decentralised way. This thriving research community regards computer programming, albeit at high level, as part of their creative research workflow to explore novel sonic worlds. On the other hand, the same conditions have helped scientists push the boundaries of what is possible to do within the realms of DSP, both in breadth and in depth. The world of telecommunication is still at the forefront of this research, but everyday uses of such technology barely scratch the surface of what would be creatively possible to achieve. We are surrounded by these algorithms, in our telephones, web browsers, and other technology, yet digital artists and researchers struggle to obtain deeper access to it to facilitate wider creative research use.

One such advance is signal decomposition: a sound can now be separated into its transient, pitched, and residual constituents. These potent algorithms are partially available in closed software, or in laboratories, but not at a suitable level of modularity within the coding environments used by the creative researchers (Max, PureData, and SuperCollider) to allow ground-breaking 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.

The Fluid Corpus Manipulation project proposes to tackle this issue by bridging this gap between DSP and music research, empowering techno-fluent aesthetic investigators with a toolset for signal decomposition within their mastered software environments, in order to experiment with new sound and gesture design untapped in large corpora. The three degrees of manipulations to be explored are (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. This research therefore is carried out by an interdisciplinary team of composers and programmers, who seek further ideas from a steering group of scientists and composers, in order to propose new tools and approaches to large corpora exploration. Providing some of the big data tools to relatively small datasets, it enables the creative researchers in this project, and subsequently a whole community, to develop novel ways to manipulate, abstract, and hybridize their personal datasets of sounds and gestures, to discover new sounds and gestures through novel approaches and solutions to old problems - either acoustic limits, browsing concerns, classification, or variation making.

The timeliness of the project can hardly be better: the convergence of a community of eager techno-fluent composers, the maturity of the DSP algorithms, the proliferation of rich corpora, and the available computing power, provide the perfect ground for this project to propose progressive sonic research possibilities. To bridge the gap between the communities of creative and DSP researchers is a major challenge, yet FluCoMa proposes a foundational approach and methodological insight to tackle this issue by providing the tools at the right level to the creative researchers, and direct critical subversive feedback to the scientists.
The work so far follows the plan of iterative design proposed in the original grant project, consisting of finding the best interface to empower techno-fluent composers with deeper knowledge and tools for sound separation. We are working in concentric circles, from hypotheses of the core research team tested locally, then with the feedback and research of the commissioned composers and the other plenary participants, to finally release the tools publicly to the various community of practice. The first toolset has now reached that last stage, and the second toolset, focused on manipulation and hybridization, is under its first design iteration.

The project has, so far:
- published two iterations of the toolset online as extensions for the leading creative coding environments (Max, PureData, SuperCollider) and the command-line interface, on the 3 leading operating systems (MacOS, Windows10, Linux) as well as the underlying code architecture allowing such a breadth of interdisciplinary researches in algorithm and interface interaction;
- released two prototypes of the community-building tools: an online learning resource to empower composers with the knowledge required to master and subvert their new tools (learn.flucoma.org) and an online forum for discussing the various use of the tools (discourse.flucoma.org)
- published 19 papers, of which 17 are peer-reviewed;
- made two new strands of community-building and research-enabling knowledge transfer: in-depth articles, and video podcasts with leading practice-researchers in the field of creative coding;
- produced two concerts totaling of 13 works showcasing research made with the two toolboxes, both in a world-leading festival. The first concert was broadcasted in parts by the BBC with short interviews explaining the research aspects of the works. All works were made public on YouTube;
- made public 56 videos taken from the key elements of the plenaries, tutorials, pieces, and keynotes;
- have supported the aesthetic research of 7 other pieces where elements of the toolset were partially tested;
- released 4 other code sources, plus the 5 codebases from the papers above;
- supported the emergence of the first two independent coding projects emerging from the community, which in turn fed back ideas of interface research;
The project is on track to provide new affordances in sound manipulation, in real-time and in deferred-time, and most importantly, integrated at the right level of granularity in creative coding researchers’ workflows, yielding new works, new sounds and new questions about taxonomies, hybridisations and interpolations. This
final cycle is underway and is about completing a tight ecosystem of new research methodologies with the right toolset, know-how, shared questions, and sustainable code-base to enable a life beyond the funded project. The emergence of workshop material, with a clear curriculum buidling on inviting more diverse contributors to the field, is also being designed and has been accepted in the world-leading peer-reviewd conference in the field of computer music next summer.
snapshot of the learning platform (learn.flucoma.org)
Logo of the project
three different interfaces emerging from the data itself (NIME2019 paper)
a snapshot of the overview page of the first toolbox in the Max environment