Author: Janindu Nanayakkara

Devine Lu Linvega currently lives on a sailboat, and can be found lurking in discord chat rooms hinting at possible bugs and easter eggs in his work. He also created ORCA, along with its companion programs (such as the synthesiser Pilot which we will be using ) under the design collective 100rabbits aboard Devine’s sailboat.

What is ORCA?

Orca is a visual programming environment for making music. Except, there are no words, loops or long lines of code. The IDE is simply a grid composed of placeholder ‘*’ characters. The program does not produce sound on its own, and instead produces MIDI events, OSC connections and UDP packets to communicate what sound should be played. I use Pilot, which is a synthesizer that Devines’ team created to produce my sounds. Even then, I could not send MIDI events to pilot. However, I could send them to superCollider. This approach did not work as Supercollider began picking up some immutable background noise through the same port. Hence I used UDP packets with the “;” operator to create sounds.

How does ORCA work?

The interaction of code and computer flows through “bangs”, a concept borrowed from Max/MSP and Pure Data. live programming concepts of immediate execution. These bangs differ from traditional programming languages like C which have complex blocks of code.

The bangs are maintained by frames which are discrete time steps. Each frame represents one “tick” of the sequencer’s clock (its rate is determined by the BPM). Every frame, the grid is updated and evaluated. Uppercase operators in ORCA execute automatically on every frame, ensuring a continuous, rhythmic flow of actions.

ORCAs IDE was built on inspiration from early 2000s games like Dwarf Fortress.

Operators
There are only 26 alphabetical operators. They go from A-Z and have 8 special operators. Some familiar operators to what we have seen in Tidalcycles are:
C clock(rate mod): Outputs modulo of frame.
D delay(rate mod): Bangs on modulo of frame.
U uclid(step max): Bangs on Euclidean rhythm.
: midi(ch oct note velocity*): Send a midi note.
; pitch(oct note): Send pitch byte out. (Sends this as a UDP message to the synthsizer)
Also interestingly, operators N, S, E, W, which represent the directions can be used to send bangs in their respective directions. Devine shows that this works lille sending marbles to collide with an object.

The above operators produce bangs, combined with other functions such as add and variables, we can make these bangs come in contact with events that we created. An example MIDI event is “:94g..”

The tools roots are from a misunderstanding about tidal that Devine had. ORCA tries to give an accessible way to do generative programming without a large programming background. The tool in a way gamifies the experience of making music in contrast to coding, making music. As ORCA does not compile and run in to errors, live coders experiment will not face syntax errors or compilation errors while editing the code.

However, the packaging of ORCA may seem inaccessible to some, the browser based package requires webMidi to be installed and configured and the locally run version that runs on node requires building on the terminal. Furthermore ORCA is a very “cool” tool to use in front of an audience as the interface between the computer and programmer transcends that of traditional programming languages. From a performance perspective, Orca can also connect to Unity, enabling interaction with 3D graphics. ORCA represents a paradigm shift in live coding by proving that constraints breed creativity. As Devine Lu Linvega states: “It’s for children. The documentation fits in a tweet”, yet professionals use it for everything from IDM sets to interactive installations. ORCA is both entry point and advanced tool in the ecosystem of computational art.

Below is a demo of ORCA in action.

Many ORCA users are technically proficient, employing the tool for solo experimentation with synths or DAWs, yet the platform thrives on community involvement and input. An engaged live coding community collaborates on Discord and Reddit, sharing techniques and directly interacting with creator Devine Lu Linvega, who actively participates in discussions and guides the ecosystem’s evolution through hints and open dialogue.

A central argument of the text is that the subtle variations in rhythm such as the variation of the position that the snare is played on a backbeat is what makes music human. And that examine this ‘humanness’ of music which arises in performance variation, musical expression and microtiming as seen prior. This maybe why a recording artist such as Ye has human electronic and sample heavy but still sounds very human (a caveat to this argument is also that Kanye uses human voice as a instrument in his tracks).

The interplay of the human element and technology is a key theme throughout the text. While technology can create precise, “robotic” rhythms, the text notes that this absence of microtiming can also be a powerful artistic choice. The deliberate use of “robotic” rhythms can suggest a disembodied, futuristic ideal, or can be a way to signify on technology and history. However, the author also explores ways in which technology is being used to capture and manipulate the nuances of human performance, such as through sampling and the manipulation of recorded sound, in an attempt to retain that human element in music.

A large part of music performances in the modern era are just the presence or the interaction of the artist with their art. For example, a mainstream artist such as Playboi Carti will most probably recite the ad-libs and dance to their own songs that are being played in the background. This example of performance being the act of through vibing extends to mainstream DJs.

The text shows that the “human” element in music has capacity for expression, which can be either mimicked or intentionally avoided as a stylistic choice.

Software engineering or computer science as a practice teaches us to keep code abstracted and encapsulated for it to be production ready. While the average college coding assignment will be in one file with a large amount of ‘cout>>”here”; ‘s or ‘printf(“heree2”);’s humanising the the otherwise cold language of computers, code bases in the industry are surprisingly bland.

The existence of Live coding is an attempt of liberating the tool that we use to interact with computers. It is also an attempt at regaining the autonomy over the the strict regimes and practices we have established for communicating through computers. In a sense, the Turing Complete User definition established in the text diminishes with every iteration that a thought goes through a computer.

Furthermore the level of transparency in the process of creating the work in Live coding adds to its punk nature, as it tries to combat the encapsulated and abstracted, product oriented nature of software and code we have been accustomed to. In addition the novelty of using code, in contrast to other mediums of electronic artistic expression is a largely refreshing one.