Who Is Luke Phillips, the Design Engineer Behind Femur?

Updated

Luke Phillips is a software engineer and musician who runs Femur (femurdesign.com), where he builds expressive, accessible music tools across software, hardware, and the web. He describes himself as working across music technology, creative tools, and AI, with more than a decade spent building interactive instruments and learning products — from browser-based synths to cross-platform apps and spatial hand tracking. If you want to know what kind of work stands behind the Femur name, his background is the answer: a mix of frontend and UX engineering, creative coding, audio, MIDI, and real-time interaction.

What Femur is

Femur is Phillips's personal design and engineering practice rather than a company with a product catalog. Its stated goal is "making musical things that anyone can play," and the site presents a portfolio of instruments and collaborations that illustrate that idea.

The projects listed on the site span three areas:

  • Audio plugins and instruments — Funputs, a suite of MIDI instruments
  • Client and R&D work — ROLI
  • Browser-based instruments — BlokDust, Omni, and Theremin

The projects behind the name

Funputs

A suite of MIDI instruments built around a specific design question: most music software relies on knobs, sliders, menus, numbers, and text, and Phillips has been exploring how much of that can be replaced with space, colour, movement, and shape.

Three components are named:

Instrument Function
Comet An expressive XY pad
Orbit Tunes you to any scale
Cluster Generates chords

You can play with a mouse, or pair a phone or tablet for wireless multi-touch control. The site dates Funputs to 2026.

ROLI (2019–2026)

Phillips worked across piano learning, interactive notation, audio, hardware integration, and conversational AI, including AI Music Coach and Airwave. One concrete detail worth noting: he integrated computer vision into ROLI's platforms to give real-time guidance on finger positions for piano learners, and to let musicians shape sound expressively through gesture.

BlokDust (2015)

An open-source, browser-based music-making environment. You join blocks to build synths, process your voice, remix samples, and create self-playing systems. It runs in the browser and is free to play.

Omni

A web instrument for playing and learning musical scales from cultures around the world. It combines a pitch constellation, harp, effects, harmonies, and loop recording — a tactile approach to scale learning rather than a notation-first one.

Theremin (2014)

A multi-touch Web Audio synthesiser for shaping waveforms, delay, feedback, and "scuzz" directly in the browser. It's the earliest project listed and shows the same browser-based, hands-on approach that runs through the later work.

What this tells you about his approach

A few consistent threads run through the portfolio:

  • Accessibility as a design constraint, not an add-on. The recurring phrase is "anyone can play" — instruments are built so that complicated musical ideas feel immediate and playable.
  • Technology that gets out of the way. Phillips says he likes building things where the technology recedes as quickly as possible, which is why the interfaces lean on gesture, colour, and shape instead of parameter lists.
  • Browser-first experimentation. BlokDust, Omni, and Theremin all run in the browser with no install, which makes them easy to try before committing to anything.
  • Real-time interaction as a specialty. Audio, MIDI, hand tracking, and multi-touch control all point to the same technical core.

How to explore the work

The site links directly to each project, plus GitHub and a contact link. If you're evaluating Phillips for collaboration or hiring, the most useful starting points are:

  1. Play Omni or Theremin — both are browser instruments, so you can judge the interaction design in a few minutes without setup.
  2. Try BlokDust — the open-source environment shows how he structures a larger creative tool.
  3. Look at Funputs — the most recent work and the clearest statement of his current design direction.
  4. Check GitHub — for a direct read on the code behind the instruments.

For anyone asking what Femur is, the short answer is that it's the working identity of a design engineer whose output is playable musical tools — and the projects above are the evidence.