The most interesting move in this paper is that Parkinson and Bell refuse to make Deadmau5 the villain. They take his “we all hit play” blog post seriously as a philosophical position, and when you do that it actually gets complicated, because his argument is not obviously wrong. He is saying the compositional labor already happened in the studio, and the live show is something else, a collective ritual where the spectacle and the crowd are what constitute the “liveness.” The weird implication the paper sort of stumbles onto is that this puts Deadmau5 closer to Francisco Lopez, who performs in a pitch black room with zero performer visibility, than either of them would probably be comfortable admitting. Completely opposite aesthetics, same underlying logic: the music exists independent of real-time human gesture, so stop pretending otherwise.

What the paper is really asking, even if it dances around a clean answer, is what audiences are actually tracking when they call something “live.” Bailey’s answer is that the music is being made right now in response to this specific moment and you can feel that. Deadmau5’s answer is that the crowd energy and spectacle are real regardless of what the laptop is doing. Live coding tries to split the difference by projecting the screen, making the compositional labor visible in real time, which is genuinely strange when you think about it. You are watching someone think. The paper’s sharpest observation is actually about virtuosity and the body, that traditional instrumental skill is legible because audiences share a human body with performers and intuitively understand physical limits. That legibility simply does not exist for typing, and the paper admits it without fully resolving it, which I think is where the most honest and interesting tension in the whole argument lives.