Category: Spring 24

The segment at the end regarding the ephemerality and spatiotemporal uniqueness of each live coding performance is something that started occurring to me when I started documenting all the work we have been doing in class. I’d often make a recording before class. Then moments before my performance in my class (or even on the spot at times), I’d think of something new and integrate that in the live performance. I’d then scrap my old recording and try doing a “good” take at home only to be frustrated that it never ended up sounding like how it sounded in class, because I triggered a certain line at the wrong cue. This excerpt brings up folk music in the start, and it brings me a certain solace to see this practice in the same light as folk or jazz – ever-changing, improvisational, yet without ever completely destroying the basis of the original. There is a big tradition of folk artists making covers; Bob Dylan famously having made over 200 covers (https://www.whosampled.com/Bob-Dylan/covers). Over this semester, I have tried replicating and covering songs that have been stuck in my head during that week, and once I shift them into this live-coding improvisational paradigm, I often end up with things that are quite new.

With our recent explorations in quantizations, pattern bundlings, A/V syncing and time-based triggering things do get “better” (not sure what the word to use here is, since again it takes away from some of the spontaneity of the performance”). However, this reading did help me get a bigger picture understanding of the linguistics of this medium. I was aware of some general gists like the paradigms of functional programming, something that took me a bit of time to wrap my head around when I tried sharing a state variable between 3 orbit patterns and manipulating it. But even the choice to name certain functions in a particular way (krush/crush) comes from the understanding that the act of writing this code is a performance in and of itself. The “pre-gramming” of some of these languages is done keeping in mind the needs of the programmer and the enjoyment of the audience.

Art and music. Thinking about art and music as 2 different, unrelated terms is interesting. Not in ways where some say they are the same exact thing, but in a way that the way I define art is a self-expression made tangible. Be it Music, painting, digital art, or even writing, they are all forms of art, each in their own way, and each intertwines together in some way or another.

Close links between music and visual arts are not only to be observed in the works of musicians/artists trained in several disciplines. An interest in the respective other art form undoubtedly went hand in hand with the explicitly interdisciplinary questions that became increasingly frequent, in particular in the context of the emergence of abstraction in painting and later in film.

Justin Hoffmann, Sandra Naumann

The quote above explains a lot about what it means to be an artist, what it means to be led by a creative outburst, and what it means to be yourself in a different light combining, techniques to make a boom.

Personalities

One thing that really stood out to me, however, is personality/self-expression, or publicity and method of publicity. I feel like, personally, when I think about funky, crazy, or cool, I will not think about a writer or a poet, it will usually be an artist, a dancer, or a musician. However, looking into it a little bit deeper, Any artist is someone who spends life looking for an untraditional way of self-expression, a writer, however, would not interact with the crowd, or the people as much, others have a form of self-expression that shares with those around them, that makes them stand out, look different, or mostly be themselves in a world where they don’t care about judgment.

SO WE DID

Art, as I said, I feel is a form of self-expression, the author talked often about weird paths that artists took, about personalities they chose at a time of the day when they get to be a different version of themselves,

For a whole series of artist-musicians/musician-artists, the principle that a good punk song only needed three chords applied just as much as the do-it-yourself attitude.

They started punk, they forgot rules, prevented disciplines from holding them back, and helped the hidden parts in themselves show.

Artists will use whatever they have, from technology to music to text, material, code, and junk, to find expression and creation, that is what I see an artist as, and it will forever remain interesting how different everyone will combine the tools they have. From visuals to music, we all find the room we want to grow in. And it will always remain interesting that one day, music and art weren’t one from the other; that is the only way I can see it today.

As I went into the nuances noted in the excerpt, I was super impressed by the investigation of how human expression is represented in computer code. It’s mind boggling to observe how, when represented on a computer, something as naturally expressive and complex as human expression—whether in music, video animation, or choreography—can be reduced to numerical data. This change from complex, expressive forms of expression to numerical values highlights a basic feature of live coding, or programming using human expression, which just flies over one’s head if they don’t think critically enough. Manipulating just a little bit of this converted numerical data, playing around with it makes a world of difference in the expression the work is trying to convey, which is pretty amazing to think about. A world of possibilities for dynamic, interactive performances arises from the convergence of human creativity and computational precision in the field of live coding, where music, timbre, and even dancing are transformed into data for manipulation. And, different systems prioritize different types of data for live coding, which is another thing I was fascinated by.

The live coding language design conversation piqued my interest in the way that different systems order different components in order to satisfy different creative demands. The diverse range of techniques within the live coding community is reflected in the distinct preferences and priorities of each creator’s live coding system. The focus on components like compositional possibilities, expressive range, and visual/melodic progression demonstrates the sophisticated knowledge of how code may be used as a creative medium. In addition to providing live coders with a variety of tools to work with, this diversity in language design also emphasizes how live coding is a creative discipline that is always changing to meet the requirements and realize the ambitions of its practitioners.

The Notation classity of music practices as stylism, traditionalism and restructuralism. Notation in live coding allows us to play with parameters. It gives more possibilities for people to compose music. Also the author mentions the ephemeral nature of live coding. Some live coders will not save their code after the performance. This led me to ask, since Live Coding is not the same as traditional music production, and since it allows more people to create music through Live Coding, can this form of music production be called “creative”? Recently, Live Ableton released its thirteenth version, with a large amount of AI music generation. One can write a few notes at random and generate a complete piece of music. I think that although more people can compose music in this way, the essence of “creativity” in music has disappeared. Unlike coding itself, art is something that requires a lot of time, and it’s good that people are finding shortcuts to it, but the process of creation should not abandon the “creation” itself. The article makes us consider how live coding challenges traditional understanding of composition and performance. Live Coding questions the nature of creativity.

At some point, the author describes a live coder as somebody “concurrently playing and composing.” The complexity of live coding is much more well delivered with this description, as it captures the essence of having to make decisions on the composition and arrangement AND the actual playing of the components at the same time. Based on this, the author goes to explain the importance of notation in live coding, and how these notations serve as a way live coders can manipulate different aspects of the music. Reading this, I finally understood why the concept of ‘live coding’ itself gave me a lot of pressure. I think it may be because there are tools readily available, opening up so many possibilities. However, such large number of options mean that it’s going to be hard to make a decision. But, in live coding, decisions have to be made quickly, on the spot, during the performance.

I also like how he wraps up saying that live coding “treads on uncommon path between oral and written culture, improvisation versus the composed, and the spontaneous versus the arranged.” This again holds the essence of having the minimum amount of plan done before the performance, and having to do both the arranging and the playing at the same time during the performance.

In this text, the author discusses the impact and role of the notation in live coding. It was interesting to read about different literature in music and computer science intertwined with the history of live coding. One of the parts that was most interesting to me was that different live coding platforms have their own perspective on live performance. The author compares using a different live coding language to switching between different natural languages, and that it can change how we shape our thoughts as coders. When I used Sonic Pi for the Research Project, I felt a similar transition in ways of writing the codes compared to TidalCycles. In Sonic Pi, you need to run the whole program again when you change the code, while you can choose to run a block of code in TidalCycles. Due to this difference in its system, I got the impression that I need to think from a broader perspective when using Sonic Pi, considering the big picture as I start a performance. I wonder if it would be also a different experience when I try another live coding platform. Another part I found interesting is how the author connects pattern-based music representations to computer algorithms and to textile weaving and braiding. Here, the author refers to another article by composer Laurie Spiegel, whose writing we read previously in class, about categories of pattern manipulation in computer music. I think it is really interesting that some of these pattern manipulation techniques can be directly mapped to basic computer operations such as bit shifting (‘<<’ and ‘>>’) to rotation.

I found the author’s comparison between computer languages and human languages intriguing, as it highlights how different languages influence our expressions, molding our thoughts and personalities. The author suggests that switching to another language could even alter our physical gestures while speaking. In live coding, these effects are particularly pronounced, given that languages are typically high-level and often crafted with particular visual or musical styles in mind, thereby imposing creative constraints. This point made me wonder how the notation systems of Tidalcycles and Hydra might be affecting our class’s live coding outputs. At the beginning of the class, I found myself sticking to highly vibrant and psychedelic-ish visuals. However, after going through Hydra documentation and also seeing my classmates’ performances, it showed me that a variety of visual styles can be achieved depending on the approach taken.

The text also highlights the evolving nature of live coding culture, particularly regarding its stance on commercialization and consumption. As documentation becomes more prevalent, the once anti-commercialization ethos of live coding seems to be shifting. However, this shift is not necessarily negative; rather, it fosters an open-source community where knowledge-sharing and collaboration thrive. In my case, I often find myself resorting to online examples to explore the possibilities of languages I’m attempting to learn. Observing someone implement a specific function or utilize an unusual notation sparks ideas for me to experiment with those techniques in my own projects. By saving and sharing code, practitioners contribute to a pool of resources that enriches the community and promotes collective learning and inspiration.