When coding live, I’ve always felt scared when writing code live. Partly because I am not really skilled and familiar with the code, but also it’s a sense of exposure that I felt greatly uneasy about. Through the reading tho, I’m struck by the sentence that says how the reveal of the immediacy of decision making makes the audience feel the liveliness of a music and the process of creation. Like how Bailey and Deadmau5 differentiate their view of what liveliness is, it occurs to me that “live” is not merely about being present, being there, but it’s the sense that something can go unexpected at any moment, and accidents can be further developed. 

Like what Bailey says, “[the] accidental can be exploited through the amount of control exercised over the instrument, from complete – producing exactly what the player dictates – to none at all – letting the instrument have its say” (italics our own) (Bailey 1993, 100). Instruments are treated as having an agency in the making of music, where we exploit the elements that are not predefined by us humans. This became paradoxical when it comes to computers, as computers themselves run in processors, code and each element follows the structure that is artificially defined, but it is the timely “unstructured” practices that brings it to life. The author says that live coding “allows for the demonstrations of instrumental virtuosity” by showing the screen, it erases the assumption we have of computers as everything is structured and hidden. 

Personally, I find it interesting to see the balance between the composition and the liveliness of live coding. As the author says that a live coding performance has set composition like a pre-performance that are used for compositional purposes. Yet, to avoid live coding becoming mediatized as simply a press of the play button, or control enter to run the code one by one like what I would do in the past, I realize the importance of being at the spot and allowing accidents to happen. Yet, to become a “skilled” live coder, the understanding of composition and familiarity is what needs to be further developed. 

I feel like this reading put me in some sort of live coding crisis because I genuinely couldn’t pick which side I’m with more. I do my demos with Deadmau5 logic in mind, reliability over improvisation, but that doesn’t mean I actually agree with it. I think I just do it because it’s safe. But then that makes me feel like am I even really ‘live’ coding when I do that?

When we were doing the jam session in class, it felt completely different. A lot more improvisation was happening. I was very intimidated at first, but then I started playing around with Tidal. Worst case, you just mute the sound and move on. That felt way more ‘live’ to me. I’d much rather if I were the audience watch someone improvise rather than watch someone take the predictable route.

However, as the performer, I think I’m kind of stuck between both. I default to safe and reliable when I’m on my own, but I actually enjoy the improvisation side more when I put my nerves aside.

They present a fascinating exploration of liveness in electronic music by contrasting the diametrically opposed performance philosophies of stadium DJ Deadmau5 and free improvisational guitarist Derek Bailey. By placing the highly predictable and playback based spectacles of Deadmau5 at one end of a continuum and the spontaneous real time composition of Bailey at the other, the authors effectively carve out a distinct theoretical space for the practice of live coding. This persuasively argues that, contrary to popular assumptions about laptop musicians merely pressing play live coding actually aligns much closer to traditional instrumental improvisation. By actively exposing the compositional labor through projected code and treating software as a fluid, real-time medium, live coders reclaim the laptop not just as a studio tool for reproduction but as a genuine musical instrument capable of spontaneous, unscripted expression.

When we begin to think of the laptop as a musical instrument, similar to a guitar or piano, live coding takes on a more traditional musical meaning. In my own practice as a CS major, especially in this class, I often rely on pre-written scripts, making only small adjustments or sometimes simply running code and still considering it “live.” However, the paper challenges this assumption by emphasizing that liveness is not defined by the presence of a performer, but by real-time decision-making and compositional activity. This places practices like Deadmau5’s performance—where much is pre-structured—on a different end of the spectrum from live coding. Instead, live coding aligns more closely with improvisational traditions, such as those represented by Derek Bailey, where creation happens in the moment.
Now that we are required to do live coding sessions as a group, it pushes me away from heavy pre-planning and forces me to engage more directly with the code in real time with my group members. This shift makes the process feel much more aligned with the paper’s idea of liveness, allowing us to respond to each other and build something on the fly rather than relying on pre-written structures.

The word “live” originally meant something simple: a performer, on stage, in front of you, doing something in real time. But this paper complicated that definition in ways I did not expect. Auslander argues that “liveness and mediatization can co-occur” (Section 2), meaning something can be pre-built and still be considered live. That already tells you the word has lost a fixed meaning.

The contrast between Deadmau5 and Derek Bailey did not resolve this for me, it made it harder. Bailey believes music should be composed entirely in the moment with “no stylistic or idiomatic commitment” (Section 4), while Deadmau5 openly admits “we all hit play” (Section 3) and is completely comfortable with that. Personally, I side with Deadmau5.

Growing up in the UAE, the music I know is crafted, refined, and then presented. The artistry lives in the preparation, not in making things up on the spot. Deadmau5 himself said it best: “my skills shine where it needs to shine… in the goddamned studio” (Section 3). Showing your screen during a performance does not automatically make it more “live” than presenting finished work with intention. The paper frames live coding as closer to Bailey’s improvisation, but for me, performing your work in front of an audience is what makes it live, regardless of when the composition happened.

When the reading discussed the two very distinct views of Bailey and Deadmau5 on live performance, it made me realize that throughout this course I have been changing from Deadmau5’s approach to Bailey’s. I am not sure if this change comes from my major in computer science or my previous experience with coding, where I would always have a clear idea of what my code should do and expect it to follow a rigid structure of input and output even before writing it. I brought that same mentality into this class, where I had very specific ideas and a structured vision of how my sounds should be. This is very much how Deadmau5 approaches live performance. Sometimes, it made me frustrated that Hydra visuals turned out differently from what I had planned in my head, but looking unexpectedly cool, where even small changes created something interesting. The same applies to audio. Because of this, I have started to loosen up my approach in both solo coding practices and group work these days. Instead of always starting with a fixed idea, I now allow myself to write a few lines, observe what happens, and then experiment further to see if I like the result. I believe this has made me more like a Bailey-style live performer.

I also really like how the reading defines “liveness.” It says that computers are merely tools and do not inherently possess life or liveliness. Instead, true liveness comes from the “performer’s active role in generating sound, rather than their presence as a figurehead in a spectacle.” I believe that whether a performance is prerecorded or not, the real value of calling something “live coding” lies in allowing the audience to see the performer’s real-time interaction and decision-making through code, and how they engage with the computer in the moment. In that sense, I can still see the value in Deadmau5’s performances, where elements are pre-produced. However, I see more greater value in real-time exploration for being vulnerable, making mistakes, and creating something totally unexpected. Treating the instrument as a tool for discovery and valuing unpredictability is an approach I am now trying to adopt myself.

The tension between “liveness” and “showmanship” is at the heart of Parkinson and Bell’s exploration of the laptop as a musical instrument. The authors provide a framework for evaluating what actually constitutes a live performance by comparing Deadmau5’s “playback” philosophy and Derek Bailey’s “instant composition” idea. My experience in NIME classes suggests that there is often a desperate scramble to justify the laptop’s presence on stage by layering it with external sensors, elaborate costumes, and “performative” gestures that frequently have a tenuous relationship with the actual sound generation. This creates a “narrative flow” that feels artificial – a costume draped over a simple sensor to distract the audience from the fact that the performer is just interacting with a computer. Live coding, however, suggests that this physical theater is unnecessary. By following the TOPLAP manifesto to “show us your screens”, the live coder moves the visible intricacy from the performer’s body to the performer’s mind, rendered in real-time as logic and syntax.

This shift toward the laptop as a minimum medium aligns with Bailey’s concept of the “instrumental impulse”. Live coding embraces the computer’s inherent, unadulterated affordances: the keyboard, the mouse, and the code. Parkinson and Bell argue that the “natural resources” of the laptop are not found in how it can be made to mimic a guitar’s physicality, but in its capacity for algorithmic complexity and generative uncertainty. In this light, the laptop is a like sophisticated adding machine that becomes an instrument through the elegance of the code written in the moment. The “liveness” is found in the risk of the syntax error and the transparency of the thought process, rather than the sweat of a choreographed movement.

Ultimately, this reading suggests that live coding offers a more honest path for electronic music than the “spectacle” of EDM or the “gestural narrative” of some NIME practices. If, as Francisco Lopez suggests, electronic music doesn’t inherently need the “concert hall tradition” of physical gesture, then live coding creates a new kind of stage presence that is purely functional. It replaces the performer-as-figurehead with the performer-as-architect. This raises a critical question for our practice: if we strip away the costumes and the sensors to focus on the “minimum medium” of the screen, does the audience’s lack of “code literacy” turn our logic back into a mere visual spectacle? If the audience cannot read the “instrument” we are playing, are we simply trading one type of misunderstood narrative for another?