Author: Louis Li

A few key words I extracted from this article are “sonic meditation”, “listen”, “heal”, and “feminist activism”. “sonic meditation” is an “experiment in self-care” initiated by Oliveros. In this meditation, Oliveros “taught awareness through slow, quotidian movements like sitting, standing, lying, and walking. In meditation, Oliveros asks participants to feel the rhythms of their bodies with the sounds they make, such as the sound of breathing. This kind of meditation is regarded as a “turning of mind and body”. For Oliveros, when “one’s inner experience is made manifest and accepted by others”, healing can occur. She herself would follow this code by sharing her “Sonic Meditations” in print and in performance. Meanwhile, because of the inherently gender-exclusive nature of “sonic meditation,” such practices are seen as a feminist struggle.

For me, there is a controversial point in the article where the author calls “sonic meditation” a “musical experimentation”. A related issue is whether the breathing and the sound made by the gong can be included in the category of music. Beyond that, I think this “quiet activism” of listening is really an action to create a more open and inclusive society. Through such meditation experiments, people can pay more attention to listening. By bringing this habit to life, people can become more attentive to the inner experience of others. For females who lacked voice and attention at that time, this was an innovative and bold attempt to fight for the rise of feminism. But again, who would have thought that feminism would be expressed in such an obscure and seemingly unrelated way?

When I started reading this article, what came to my mind was the concept of program music that I learned in “Introduction to the History of Western Music”. In this context, program music refers to music that carries some extramusical meaning, some “program” of literary idea, legend, and scenic Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” Violin Concerto, for example, describes the four seasons as indicated in its title. When you listen to “Winter”, you can literally sense the cold wind blowing around you. This is also due to the rapidity of the violin playing in the piece. Anyway, what I want to point out here is that there was this kind of sense of combining music with graphics (scenes) during the classical music period, even though at first the graphics were often abstract and even did not exist in physical form (in people’s imagination).

 

As I read further, I found this interesting quote that says “the point was not to link different arts with one another but to find an appropriate means of expression for a particular idea, to test concepts in another field, or simply to extend one’s own radius of effect”. As we can see from the examples given in the article, the artists are not making cross-disciplinary art for the sake of making cross-disciplinary art. Instead, they conceptualized in their minds what ideas they wanted to realize before making cross-disciplinary art, and then tried to express their ideas in the form of cross-disciplinary art creation. This kind of creation is obviously experimental and highly groundbreaking.

 

At the end of the article, we can see that “the dual profession of artist-musician/musician-artist is no longer anything of note”, rather, “PR strategies demonstrate how an artist or musician’s own cultural product can benefit from the adaptation of the respective other systems”. I’m curious if this being tied up with commercial capital is an indication that the trend of cross-disciplinary art-making has become so popular that people have become accustomed to it, or if it is an indication that it is difficult to make commercial value that people are transitioning to art content that can make money for them.

For me, this project is by far the most challenging one, and again, the one I prepared for most carefully. I must say that I put more effort into making the music than the visual, and I am relatively more satisfied with the music part as well.

For the music part, I used the Lupin III theme as the theme motive. I would consider my musical pattern as=>

Intro

The main part I(with motive)

The Main part II(with buildup+motive)

Bridge(saxophone solo)

End(with buildup+motive)

For the structure of the music, I was inspired by “Theme from Lupin III 2021”.

I would also like to share some details of my music part: First, I used the classic bossa nova drum pattern in the intro and main part I, which contains an eight-beat hihat, a bottom drum, and a side drum. Secondly, I use the hihat in 8 beats as an instrument throughout the song to serve as a link between different parts (I think it works quite well). Thirdly, I deliberately increased the contrast in each part: in some parts, I used multiple fast-paced percussion and heavy metal guitars (namely, the main part II) to create a passionate atmosphere; I only used the piano for the transition between the endings. I hope to use this sense of contrast to describe Lupin’s ups and downs adventure story.

For my visual part, honestly speaking I didn’t study the transition between the images that carefully. The result of this is that while I did make some interesting graphics, there are times when “too many things are happening at the same time”. So if I have more time, I think this will be the part that I want to improve. 

Here is the link to my code: https://github.com/AvatarLouisLi/Live-Coding/tree/main/Composition%20Project

Here is my work:

I chose Motifn as the live coding platform. It is a platform that focuses on creating “visualized “music by utilizing “quite a lot of third parties” like Tone.js and receiving support from live coding artists, namely Alex McLean and Charlie Roberts, the creators of the live coding software Tidal Cycles and Gibberwocky respectively. Later on, I did find that there are quite a lot of similarities between the language used in Motifn and in Tidal Cycles. I guess that’s because after all, they are all created based on JS.

It basically provides two modes for coders to play around with. One is “FUN”, which is to code on the web, and the other one is “DAW”, which is to connect MIDI to play music. I mainly tried the “FUN” mode as it is more convenient (but definitely more risky lol). 

In my exploration, I found that this platform is indeed quite user-friendly as it contains music examples as well as interactive tutorials for coders to self-study. The tutorials not only teach users how to create melody based on notes and rhythms based on using drums but even JavaScript basics. It is definitely very helpful for newbies like me. But still, this is not a highly integrated platform like Garageband on the ios system (I played around quite a lot with it), it still requires users with fundamental knowledge of coding. Nevertheless, I believe that this will not be “live coding” if it doesn’t contain the process for users to code themselves. 

 

The UI is also user-friendly. Users can manually adjust the space of the three sidebars based on their preferences or needs. Here, I really want to point out the note tracks this platform provides, which is absolutely one of its best features. Similar to the tracks in Garage Band, this system also demonstrates the track for each instrument, and users can check each note by clicking on them, and in return, the corresponding code part will also be highlighted by the cursor.

For the practical usage part, I first learned the basic structure of programming on this platform and found that it contains three parts: 1) Define a function (like function song ()), 2) “Let” function for each track (let ss = songStruture ( { ), and 3) return song. Then learned details of how to create melodies, rhythms, and arrange music structure. 

In terms of the content that we can create on this platform, I feel like there are a lot of very interesting effects that we can make, for example, the “ties” and the “vibrato” that can trigger very funny sounds. Although it’s true that this platform doesn’t provide many preset synths for users to choose is also possible to use this platform to create absolutely great pieces if you know quite a lot about composition. Like this one:

And here is a demo I made:

 

 

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. 

“Improvisation, instant, high-risk yet immersive”, is my initial impression of live coding after reading “Live Coding Towards Computational Creativity”. 

I think live coding is definitely for those “adventurers who enjoy the adrenaline rush brought by the unknown results”. This is to say, based on the content of the artist’s programming, the content presented by live coding may show strong randomness, which just as the following quote from the article demonstrates,

“When I work on writing a piece … I can perfect each sound to beprecisely as I intend it to be, whereas [when] live coding I have to be more generalised as to my intentions.“

it makes both the artist and the audience unable to accurately predict the specific output of the programming. 

When doing live coding, artists also need to take many risks, some of which we have already experienced in Tuesday’s class, such as syntax errors in programming that cause output to fail. In addition, as the following quote indicates,

“Live Coding is riskier, and one has to live with [unfifit decisions]. You can’t just go one step back unless you do it with a nice pirouette.“

Many times we make a complete work with multiple sub-contents through live coding, if one of them is not suitable and we show it, it may destroy the coherence and effect of the whole work. Therefore, I would question whether live coding is completely improvised art and whether it is completely free from the influence of traditional art. Based on my observation in Tuesday’s class, I would presume that live coding artists might have already prepared a rough outline of what they’re going to program before they do the performance so that there is both coherence and consistency in the whole work and randomness in the specifics. In my opinion, consistency and coherence are the characteristics of traditional art. For example, when we live coding music, we still tend to stick to the rhythm and rhythm of common music.

So in my opinion, what really makes live coding different from traditional artistic expression is its performance process, as Aaron said during class, “the process of people programming is as exciting as the output they get from programming”. In traditional forms of artistic expression, works often only focus on one sense. For example, music corresponds to hearing, and paintings correspond to vision. In comparison, live coding allows the audience to enjoy both visual and auditory media, and there are real people editing the production process in real-time, which makes the entire presentation process very immersive.