Algoraves are all about dancing to algorithms, including live coding as well as other approaches to controlling and performing with generative music.

The next event is on 16th May in London, featuring live coders from Alo Allik, Alexandra Cárdenas, Meta-eX, Shelly and some Mandelbrots, Sick Lincoln and Slub, alongside algorithms controlled by Cursor Miner and Ardisson.

Here’s some video from the April algoraves:

IOhannes m zmölnig

festival weekendFull props to the organisers, that was an incredible, difficult-to-summarise live.code.festival  of great people, food, beer, slides, and of course presentations and dizzying variety of excellent performances. As David put it over on the livecode list, “I’m sure I’m not the only one who looks forward to seeing how the energy and exchange of ideas it generated ripples out into the wide world”.

There was quite a bit of documenting going on, and edited video will likely appear on-line soon. For an early taste of what went on, check out the live blogging from Charles (including a reflection on his own excellent and illuminating analogue synth live patching performance), the summary from Dave, and this video of Mico Rex at the algorave, which went off spectacularly (note most of the sound is in the sub bass).

Would any computer music symposium seriously cope without an algorave after that?

UrMus is a programming environment for iOS and Android devices, including phones and tablets. It is based upon the rather charming language Lua, and provides multiple different ways of building multitouch apps, including dataflow patching.

Here’s a video which recently took 3rd place in the first ever live programming video competition, in the run up to the LIVE2013 workshop (check out 1st and 2nd place too!). It features two programmers building an instrument for a music improviser from scratch, one working on the UI, and the other on synthesis.

The full performance line-up for the live.code.festival in Karlsruhe is now available, go and check it out! The organisers (led by members of Benoit and the Mandelbrots) have put huge efforts into putting together a really great line-up, which has been peer reviewed by the community, and reaches across acoustic (via a disclavier performance), electro-acoustic, laptop ensemble and algorave contexts, and beyond. Although there have been international gatherings before, Changing Grammars in 2004, LOSS Livecode in Sheffield in 2007, and /* vivo */ in Mexico City 2012, the live.code.festival will certainly be the biggest so far. Live coders and other interested parties will be travelling from across the world, including Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Japan, Mexico and the UK (where have we forgotten?). This is going to be quite some weekend, and you can fully expect new ideas and collaborations to flow forth afterwards.

With this, the LIVE workshop, the Dagstuhl seminar, and the Computer Music Journal special issue in production, 2013 is shaping up very nicely.

Here’s the live.code.festival line-up so far. A list of all talks was also published recently.

Concert Artists

• Alexandra Cárdenas
• André Damião
• Andrew R. Brown
• Charles Céleste Hutchins
• Codetroller
• Shelly Knotts + Alo Allik
• Stéphane Shibatsuji-Perrin
• Till Bovermann + Sara Hildebrand Marques Lopes

The overtone project was started around 2009 by Jeff Rose, joined by Sam Aaron who worked on it full time for a year as part of a principled research project at the University of Cambridge. Sam has now formed a band Meta-eX with Jonathan Graham, mixing live coding with live controllers like the monome. Meta-eX are already playing across Europe, and there are rumours of them preparing an algorave set to hit London in the next month or so.

Overtone has tight integration with its Sister project Quil, a Clojure front-end to the Processing API — good for those audio/visual live coding sessions. Great stuff and definitely worth a look for the incredible README.md file alone.

The Overtone community is growing fast, and now Toxi, the generative/interactive art hero behind toxiclibs, has got involved too, running a workshop on Overtone and Quil at the Resonate festival. If you want to check out Overtone his workshop materials might be worth a look. Note though that the overtone documentation is good, and the excellent emacs live environment is itself designed to support an exploratory style of learning.

If you are intrigued though, your first port of call should probably be this 4 minute whirlwind of an intro video:

It’s nice to search twitter for “live coding“, and get a taste of what’s happening around the fringes. This has turned up some really interesting things lately:

• A thoughtful position statement for the LIVE workshop by Jonathan Edwards called “Time is of the essence”
• A super-useful commandline tool called Kryten, for recording live coding sessions for use in presentations
• A video of Julio d’Escrivan live coding the audience in the Basque country
• A video of Stephen Yi live coding in CSound
• News that Luke Iannani and Alexandra Hay will be live coding at this mouth-watering event at CCRMA in April
• Blogs from and Jordan Wood and Jesse Menn getting excited about live coding via Stephen Ramsay’s earlier commentary on Andrew Sorensen’s Study in Keith
• Someone from Sport Analysis Uk apparently live coding in Bath City football stadium

Exciting times!

Next, Zen and the Art of Live Programming, an inspiring talk by Sam Aaron at FP days in Cambridge:

Finally, a chilled-out but complex live coding session by Charlie Roberts of his webaudio based live coding system Gibber:

Lets us know of any more.

As a search on twitter will reveal, live coding is becoming increasingly popular in conference talks. Here at TOPLAP we’ve been mostly concerned with live programming languages for music and video performance, but the same principles apply to conference presentations. Both involve taking programming into social situations, and interacting live with running computer programs. Live coding is also now recognised as best practice in Computer Science lectures by such scholars as the highly influential Prof. Mark Guzdial, so we really should be taking live coding seriously as a pedagogic approach.

An excellent article by Jeffrey Way has just popped up with some useful tips for those who want to try live coding part of a conference talk. Some of the tips, like practising, planning, physical exercises, audience awareness and the general facing up to the inherent dangers of live coding could equally apply to more performance-oriented live coding. Maybe this is a good opportunity for interdisciplinary exchange, although of course many performing live coders are also professional software engineers themselves, and work right across any artificial distinction between artistic and technical practice.

The Extempore livecoding environment is emerging from a two year development, and according to its creator Andrew Sorensen, is now ready for wider use.

To whet your appetite, here’s an example of Extempore in use, in an interactive exhibit for children to explore general concepts from physics:

As is often the case, live coding was used during the design and development of the above work, but this is not necessarily evident in the end result, which is an interactive virtual world. This underlines the fact that Extempore is intended for general purpose, systems programming, albeit with strong focus on what Sorensen calls “cyberphysical programming” – interactive systems which incorporate human agents, a broad take on live coding with a take on temporal semantics and architecture which borders on the philosophical.

Extempore is very much a fully-fledged programming environment, which includes xtlang, a specially designed language with syntax and semantics similar to Lisp, but strictly typed (but with type inferencing). It developed out of the acclaimed Impromptu live coding environment, but Extempore is fully free/open source (Impromptu was closed source freeware), cross platform (MacOs X, Linux, Windows) and is designed for use in high performance realtime systems in general; not just audio/visual live coding performances.

The big news this week is that Ben Swift has started writing tutorials for Extempore, available here:

http://benswift.me/extempore-docs/

The audio infrastructure is still minimal, and Andrew and Ben would  be happy to hear from folks wanting to get involved with this side of the project.

Every self-respecting university music department now has a laptop orchestra, or similar form of LIve GRoup COmputer Performance (LIGROCOP) activity. Many of them are primarily live coding outfits, including Benoit and the Mandelbrots in Karlsruhe DE, HELO in Huddersfield UK, the Cybernetic Orchestra in Hamilton CA, BEER in Birmingham UK and of course the venerable PLOrk in Princeton US.

The second Network Music Festival (NMF; organised by members of the BILE laptop orchestra) is happening  in Birmingham UK, 22-24th February. Laptop orchestras are manifestations of the slightly longer tradition of the network band, and this year’s NMF makes an exciting connection with The Hub, who formed in the late 1970s as the world’s first computer network band.  The Hub are occasionally cited as live coding precursors, and while there are clear parallels, The Hub themselves question this, as they only edit code on stage when they’re forced to fix bugs.

The NMF features a number of live coding acts including Powerbooks Unplugged, Slub and members of Benoit and the Mandelbrots, and will create further connections with sound poetry, installation art and audiovisual performance.