What struck me reading this paper is that Deadmau5 might actually be the most honest person in the room. He looked at what electronic music performance structurally is, a technology of reproduction, and just said it plainly. Everyone else tends to perform spontaneity to some degree. Live coders project their screens and that gesture matters, but they are still building on pre-written libraries, familiar patterns, layers of abstraction they did not invent mid-set. The paper even admits that coding from scratch is an impossible ideal.

That is where things get interesting to me. Live coding is not trying to be Derek Bailey and deep down it knows it. A lot of live coders want the beat, want people dancing, want the same things Deadmau5 wants. The real difference is not some claim to purity but a willingness to keep the process visible and genuinely uncertain. Showing your screen is not proof that you escaped mediation. It is just an honest account of where the mediation is actually happening. And honestly that might be a more defensible and more interesting thing to offer than any romanticized idea of total freedom from the machine.

When coding live, I’ve always felt scared when writing code live. Partly because I am not really skilled and familiar with the code, but also it’s a sense of exposure that I felt greatly uneasy about. Through the reading tho, I’m struck by the sentence that says how the reveal of the immediacy of decision making makes the audience feel the liveliness of a music and the process of creation. Like how Bailey and Deadmau5 differentiate their view of what liveliness is, it occurs to me that “live” is not merely about being present, being there, but it’s the sense that something can go unexpected at any moment, and accidents can be further developed. 

Like what Bailey says, “[the] accidental can be exploited through the amount of control exercised over the instrument, from complete – producing exactly what the player dictates – to none at all – letting the instrument have its say” (italics our own) (Bailey 1993, 100). Instruments are treated as having an agency in the making of music, where we exploit the elements that are not predefined by us humans. This became paradoxical when it comes to computers, as computers themselves run in processors, code and each element follows the structure that is artificially defined, but it is the timely “unstructured” practices that brings it to life. The author says that live coding “allows for the demonstrations of instrumental virtuosity” by showing the screen, it erases the assumption we have of computers as everything is structured and hidden. 

Personally, I find it interesting to see the balance between the composition and the liveliness of live coding. As the author says that a live coding performance has set composition like a pre-performance that are used for compositional purposes. Yet, to avoid live coding becoming mediatized as simply a press of the play button, or control enter to run the code one by one like what I would do in the past, I realize the importance of being at the spot and allowing accidents to happen. Yet, to become a “skilled” live coder, the understanding of composition and familiarity is what needs to be further developed. 

I feel like this reading put me in some sort of live coding crisis because I genuinely couldn’t pick which side I’m with more. I do my demos with Deadmau5 logic in mind, reliability over improvisation, but that doesn’t mean I actually agree with it. I think I just do it because it’s safe. But then that makes me feel like am I even really ‘live’ coding when I do that?

When we were doing the jam session in class, it felt completely different. A lot more improvisation was happening. I was very intimidated at first, but then I started playing around with Tidal. Worst case, you just mute the sound and move on. That felt way more ‘live’ to me. I’d much rather if I were the audience watch someone improvise rather than watch someone take the predictable route.

However, as the performer, I think I’m kind of stuck between both. I default to safe and reliable when I’m on my own, but I actually enjoy the improvisation side more when I put my nerves aside.

They present a fascinating exploration of liveness in electronic music by contrasting the diametrically opposed performance philosophies of stadium DJ Deadmau5 and free improvisational guitarist Derek Bailey. By placing the highly predictable and playback based spectacles of Deadmau5 at one end of a continuum and the spontaneous real time composition of Bailey at the other, the authors effectively carve out a distinct theoretical space for the practice of live coding. This persuasively argues that, contrary to popular assumptions about laptop musicians merely pressing play live coding actually aligns much closer to traditional instrumental improvisation. By actively exposing the compositional labor through projected code and treating software as a fluid, real-time medium, live coders reclaim the laptop not just as a studio tool for reproduction but as a genuine musical instrument capable of spontaneous, unscripted expression.

When we begin to think of the laptop as a musical instrument, similar to a guitar or piano, live coding takes on a more traditional musical meaning. In my own practice as a CS major, especially in this class, I often rely on pre-written scripts, making only small adjustments or sometimes simply running code and still considering it “live.” However, the paper challenges this assumption by emphasizing that liveness is not defined by the presence of a performer, but by real-time decision-making and compositional activity. This places practices like Deadmau5’s performance—where much is pre-structured—on a different end of the spectrum from live coding. Instead, live coding aligns more closely with improvisational traditions, such as those represented by Derek Bailey, where creation happens in the moment.
Now that we are required to do live coding sessions as a group, it pushes me away from heavy pre-planning and forces me to engage more directly with the code in real time with my group members. This shift makes the process feel much more aligned with the paper’s idea of liveness, allowing us to respond to each other and build something on the fly rather than relying on pre-written structures.

The word “live” originally meant something simple: a performer, on stage, in front of you, doing something in real time. But this paper complicated that definition in ways I did not expect. Auslander argues that “liveness and mediatization can co-occur” (Section 2), meaning something can be pre-built and still be considered live. That already tells you the word has lost a fixed meaning.

The contrast between Deadmau5 and Derek Bailey did not resolve this for me, it made it harder. Bailey believes music should be composed entirely in the moment with “no stylistic or idiomatic commitment” (Section 4), while Deadmau5 openly admits “we all hit play” (Section 3) and is completely comfortable with that. Personally, I side with Deadmau5.

Growing up in the UAE, the music I know is crafted, refined, and then presented. The artistry lives in the preparation, not in making things up on the spot. Deadmau5 himself said it best: “my skills shine where it needs to shine… in the goddamned studio” (Section 3). Showing your screen during a performance does not automatically make it more “live” than presenting finished work with intention. The paper frames live coding as closer to Bailey’s improvisation, but for me, performing your work in front of an audience is what makes it live, regardless of when the composition happened.