Hi!
I studied music at UC Berkeley, then became a Smalltalk hacker by
accident (someone else in the music department was using it for
recognizing conductor gestures). I like that system because livecoding
is its essence. You change the behavior of the system as it runs, and it
never stops (although you can suspend it, like a laptop). It's composed
of objects sending messages to each other, and includes the human
interface, compiler, and other development tools. Debugging it is a live
performance art by nature.
I managed to find TOPLAP by accident, while searching the web for
something else in 2004. I had just made the first version of a music
livecoding system called Quoth. It turns out English is a subset of
Smalltalk; Quoth takes improvised English text, compiles it, and runs
it. You can manipulate musical structures or the underlying development
environment at will. See [1] for a demo movie from back then.
I was part of the TOPLAP contingent at the Transmediale conference
in Berlin in 2005. We had great fun playing together with our various
systems, in conference settings and a local nightclub. It was an
exhilarating feeling to find "my people"! :)
What first grabbed me about music livecoding was its potential to
make computer-based performances more interesting. There was great
improvisation happening, but you couldn't really tell... it still looked
like people reading their email. TOPLAP's show-your-screen imperative
was refreshing, even if I couldn't readily understand what I was seeing.
Over time, I think we have forced ourselves to incorporate ever more
accessible elements in our stagecraft (in my case, English and Second Life).
I love seeing all the other projects going on! I'm looking forward
to more in-person gatherings (I live in Amsterdam now).
thanks!
-C
[1]
http://netjam.org/quoth/demo
p.s.
I'm finally preparing a public release of Quoth, and new demos, for
this June. A longstanding problem with Smalltalk was that its groovy way
of doing everything by objects sending messages did not extend to
sharing your work. An author traditionally writes their source code out
to a file, then each person installing the code compiles the source from
the file.
This was problematic because each person's system can be quite
different from the others, and, because a static file is interposed,
there was no direct interaction between providing and consuming systems.
I've fixed this with a way of transferring compiled code between
systems, using remote messaging. Now collaborative development is as
live as individual development. That piece of the puzzle comes out in March.
--
Craig Latta
www.netjam.org/resume
+31 06 2757 7177
+ 1 415 287 3547
Received on Thu Feb 17 2011 - 23:36:16 GMT