Alex&Mathew,
'given the infinite range of possible
> > sounds + musics you can make, why do livecoders often make fairly
> > familiar sounding techno?'.
>
>
I like techno. I think that's a pritty solid reason, really.
Another thing is that some instruments are better at some styles, even
though you could play riffs on a recorder I don't think that many do as the
instrument doesn't lend itself to that very well and seems much more at home
with melodies. Livecoding -to me- seems well suited to techno. I don't see
the slightest issue with that.
A lot of these kinds of criticisms (including, I sense, these ones)
>
Sorry to interrupt the paragraph, but is the above really criticism? I think
it was a valid question that can be answered quite easily by people
livecoding techno.
I think that livecoding could also be very well suited to fugas and canons
but I don't know enough about scales to pull that off. That's a shame but
then very few instrumentalists know enough about scales to improvise fugas
and canons so I don't feel too bad about this.
> come from the "why is your technical demo not achingly beautiful and
> complex music that moves me to kiss my neighbour?" direction. Videos
> of actual performances help but we don't have a good one of slub yet
> (we were close with the recent goldsmiths gig but sadly the camera
> didn't get a feed from the desk, so sound is by microphone at the back
> of a very large hall).
>
That too is a good question. How much music moves people to kiss one's
neighbour? In my own experience, BTW, whenever I saw people that were moved
to kiss their neighbour at concerts techno was involved so we might be right
on course there.
> And there was also an interesting discussion of
> > the semiotics of the seemingly retrograde return to text as a medium
>
>
I would like to know through what means those questions were asked. Were
they conveyed using cartoons? Perhaps expressed in abstract dance? It could
be that somebody asked these questions by dragging coloured blocks around on
a sort of spreadsheet.
I know that if I were a parent I'd be positively delighted if my child would
finally stop counting, talking and writing, and get down to some serious
dragging around of coloured blocks.
Maybe people are dismissive about the humanity of computer
> programming, because the history of programming culture has in
> generally been dominated by strange men funded by the military
> industrial complex and large corporations. In the past I've
> identified with 'counter-culture' hackers, like the inhabitants of the
> early MIT lab which Steven Levy documents in his book "hackers". But
> maybe this is where the problems started, these men were actually
> working for the military (as Levy notes), and one of their most
> celebrated hacks was about the first computer game, a war similation
> called SpaceWar! This passive-aggressive culture has permeated the
> languages and tools as well as the culture, making things difficult to
> change.
Is this really true? I don't experience much aggression or war in coding. We
could also trace code to math which we could in turn trace to attempts by
the Greek to come to a understanding of the world through abstracting it. I
would describe that process as a attempt at satisfying curiosity by seeing
where the analogy collapses -if it does. To me that sounds much closer to
what we do.
> Witness the young chest beaters in the ruby on rails sausage
> parties. Maybe it's not too far-fetched to suggest live coding is a
> force against all this, although we clearly can't claim to be anything
> like a representative cross section of society, maybe we can promote
> languages and programming culture which a broader range of people can
> identify with.
>
>
Indeed. Hopefully it can also represent this curiosity I mentioned. I also
hope that -at least sometimes- it can comment on how society already does
identify with a lot of codes and rules that do get constantly re-written. In
a way, what distinguishes a "society" from "a group of people" may well be
these rules. This is not a bad thing at all, but I do feel that current
society might benefit from a greater concious awareness of these rules and
their malleability.
Yours,
Kas.
Received on Thu Nov 26 2009 - 13:24:08 GMT