There are two things in this article that interest me the most, the first one is about the author’s point of “the audience will get bored when listening to one pattern if it lacks development, evolution, and form”, and the second one is about the author’s opinion of “randomness is a relativistic phenomenon”. I would also like to talk about how these two points can be connected to the topic of our course, which is live coding.

The first point I mentioned here resonates strongly with my live performance this week. For this week’s live performance, I decided to do something more like live coding in my opinion, which is typing out codes in a limited amount of time. Obviously, this was a rather unsuccessful strategy, as I was unable to type the codes very quickly. This also made the music I made lack complexity and variation. Compared to my classmates’ work, I think I did get bored when listening to my own work as well. The author also mentions later that “our sense of anticipation grows as we wait for something more, for change, uncertainty, the unpredictable, the resumption of information”. This reminds me of the “?” Aaron mentioned during class, also “# gain (range x x rand)”. These can definitely bring change and uncertainty to the music. However, I believe that it would be unclear whether these changes and uncertainties can bring a good effect to the music itself. It’s true that as live coders, we are supposed to make more random things that contain high improvisational effects, these effects may make the music very noisy and even dissonant. This may be my personal preference, but I still believe that we should add random elements to the music with the aim of just making random things. The addition of these random elements should be based on whether the music itself sounds good.

For the second point, the author explains her point by saying “any signal, no matter how internally consistent or meaningful it is within its own context, may be perceived as random noise relative to some other coherent signal”. I agree with this and this reminds me of comparing math rock with “twinkle star” (which has the exact same rhythm pattern). Obviously, the math rock will be considered “more random” than the latter as its rhythm pattern is unconventional.