This reading gave me a clearer view of how “liveness” in music can mean very different things depending on the context. It contrasts Deadmau5’s highly pre-planned, spectacle-driven performances with Derek Bailey’s real-time, improvisational approach, and uses that contrast to explore where live coding fits in. What stood out to me is how live coding challenges the idea that laptops are just playback tools. Instead, the laptop becomes a responsive, expressive instrument—one that demands constant decision-making and invites unpredictability.

Reading this made me reflect on how easy it is to overlook the creative labor involved in electronic music when it’s not visibly tied to physical gesture. It also helped me think more deeply about how we define instruments and performance itself. Even when something is happening behind a screen, it can still carry the same energy, tension, and risk as traditional live music—and sometimes even more, because it blurs the line between composing and performing in the moment.

In a way, it reminded me of watching speedrunners code live in video game modding streams—they’re typing fast, problem-solving on the fly, and the audience watches the screen just like a performance. There’s a similar tension between planning and improvisation, and both have that excitement of “anything could go wrong or right.”