What if a musicology of live coding were to develop, where researchers deconstruct the code behind live coding improvisations as part of their work?
This was the most exciting line of the reading for me. To clarify, prior to reading the line for a second time, I was thinking of “musicology” as a study of past music cultures. For the past two weeks, I’ve been coming to class and feeling completely engrossed in how new what we’re learning feels. I would think to myself that we’re part of this rising movement of live coders, or that we’re gaining the skills to join some kind of exclusive club of artists that can have this awe-inducing effect on audiences. Since my brain has been so occupied with the novelty of it all, I forgot that like everything else, live coding will become this historical thing that students study for some background context in the classrooms of the future. The possibility of that excites me! I want to see where the practice emerged, and where it flourished. I would love to see some anthropologist’s ethnographic research of an algorave, or someone’s political analysis of live coding circles. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but I do feel that sometimes creative coders and new media artists need to think of more than just the modern and technical aspects of their (our?) work. Perhaps this is why documentation, discussion sessions, and critical analyses of creative coding are so important!