The segment at the end regarding the ephemerality and spatiotemporal uniqueness of each live coding performance is something that started occurring to me when I started documenting all the work we have been doing in class. I’d often make a recording before class. Then moments before my performance in my class (or even on the spot at times), I’d think of something new and integrate that in the live performance. I’d then scrap my old recording and try doing a “good” take at home only to be frustrated that it never ended up sounding like how it sounded in class, because I triggered a certain line at the wrong cue. This excerpt brings up folk music in the start, and it brings me a certain solace to see this practice in the same light as folk or jazz – ever-changing, improvisational, yet without ever completely destroying the basis of the original. There is a big tradition of folk artists making covers; Bob Dylan famously having made over 200 covers (https://www.whosampled.com/Bob-Dylan/covers). Over this semester, I have tried replicating and covering songs that have been stuck in my head during that week, and once I shift them into this live-coding improvisational paradigm, I often end up with things that are quite new.

With our recent explorations in quantizations, pattern bundlings, A/V syncing and time-based triggering things do get “better” (not sure what the word to use here is, since again it takes away from some of the spontaneity of the performance”). However, this reading did help me get a bigger picture understanding of the linguistics of this medium. I was aware of some general gists like the paradigms of functional programming, something that took me a bit of time to wrap my head around when I tried sharing a state variable between 3 orbit patterns and manipulating it. But even the choice to name certain functions in a particular way (krush/crush) comes from the understanding that the act of writing this code is a performance in and of itself. The “pre-gramming” of some of these languages is done keeping in mind the needs of the programmer and the enjoyment of the audience.