This chapter delves into the interesting idea of the liveness of live coding. I find it very interesting that it is a hotly debated topic, but it is mostly up to one’s own interpretation. Can a live coding set truly be live with pregramming? If there isn’t code there to begin with, is it fine to still make music beforehand, and use those elements in your performance? Is that truly live coding? I find this a really interesting topic because. going into this class, I sort of assumed that in live coding performances were always completely improv, where people work off one another on the fly. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that’s probably not the case always. From my own experience trying to live code, a lot of times there is pregrammed stuff, and if not, stuff that people probably messed around with before a performance. This is what I do, anyway. It takes a lot of skill to know all the sounds and workings of code and coordination to be able to just make something out of nothing on the spot. When I would do improv solos on the saxophone, it’s not like I would be playing stuff on the fly always. A lot of times I would be playing along to the track beforehand, analyzing the chord progressions, the key, listening to other sax solos, and workshopping random stuff until I found things that I thought sounded nice or fit with the sound of the song. That way, when I am doing my actual performance, I can incorporate these small pieces I played into my actual solo. For me, the same applies to live coding. I think almost everyone has to, you are drawing from your own musical influence when you are doing a improv performance no matter what it is, because I’m pretty sure there is not a single person who does improv performances and doesn’t listen to music. So, I believe that there is no issue in pregramming or having pieces of music that are incorporated into a live set. But, if you can do it off the dome like that, kudos to you.