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.