Ok my turn! This thread changes a lot for me, great to feel this is a
real growing movement.
I got into live coding after the 2004 changing grammars workshop on
live programming with supercollider in Hamburg, although the first
live coding I saw was by Ade with his Map/MSG environment probably a
couple of years before that. After that I started live coding with
Perl for a long time, although got frustrated with the slowness of it
and so switched to a more declarative style with Haskell. Now I'm
working on a visual language environment based on that.
As well as a very interesting way of music, I think live coding has a
strong influence on how we think about music technology. Adam Smith
said it earlier in this thread "Having done a little bit of reading in
Software Studies, I was surprised by just how many claims are
invalidated with a single simple example of livecoding." I think its
influence is yet to peak.
The ICMC call is a beautiful case:
http://icmc2011.org.uk/submit/calls/music/#laptop
Do we feel excited that live coding has its own category? Or offended
that it appears to be a joke category, that our approach needs
defending, that what we are doing has been pre-judged as not daring?
What happens if a live coder submits to another category, will they
get pushed back into this joke category? I wonder if this category is
made not to further live coding but to contain it. What's the point
of a Computer Music conference that marginalises and makes a joke
about the people who are engaging with computation?
For me, musicking is necessarily a whole-brain activity, about _both_
analog movement and discrete sequences. Academic computer music seems
preoccupied with the former to the point of bizarre snobbishness, but
computers are made for dealing with the latter. I think the challenge
for live coding is to properly unite the two, firstly by using
computer language as an undeniably creative medium, and secondly by
looking for ways of integrating language with movement, as we do with
speech.
alex
--
http://yaxu.org/
Received on Thu Feb 17 2011 - 11:01:39 GMT