julien hughes is an experimental musician and instrument designer residing in Tiohtià:ke Montreal. special applications is his endeavour.
works 2023 - 2025
canopy
2025
a soundtrack created for animator Maévis Laverdiere’s short film “Canopy”. formant and pulsar synthesis along with event-based sequencing derived from frame-rate and cue points in the original animation.
the thing itself
2025
a piece created by iteratively processing a recording of Wallace Stevens reading his poem “Not Ideas About The Thing, But The Thing Itself”. material from the original audio was extracted using machine listening tools and recombined to create a palimpsest of the poem, following the reading’s cadences and tonalities but reimagining its semantic meaning.
eukaryote
2024
stereo reduction of a 5-channel piece inspired by mitosis, meiosis and cytokinesis.
history
2024
an experiment in sequencing. a two-note melody is fed into a tape-style delay line. the delay’s buffer is then scrubbed through in order to create new melodic material.
lj[1]
2024
a short collection of songs made in the forests of British Columbia for my parents.
hyperfocus
2023
an autofictional accounting of the creative process divided into three parts: up- and down-trending shepard tones pull against and crossmodulate one another. a cacophony of physically modelled bell- and string-tones are sequenced by chaotic solutions to the logistic map. feedback networks pulse and swell against a backdrop of noise.
motioning
2023
an etude in physical modelling. bowed string sounds synthesized using extended karplus-strong techniques are accompanied by piano and miscellaneous electronics.