Kassen, good points.
Regarding fanaticism, prejudice and preferences, perhaps if we focus
on the coder and
his/her coding style _in a particular_ performance rather than the
environment, the
fanatics won't be so inflexible and stubborn. ??
Which I guess is necessary as well, because one can code clearly and
messily in every
environment. Just consider the choice of variable names in text based
or the layout in dataflow langs.
The survey would thus not be about the system but about the
presentation of it in
a particular performance. Subquestions would be about the environment
itself.
But you are right, this has to be carefully designed. Which is why a
collaborative effort would be good.
thor
On 6 Oct 2009, at 00:52, Kassen wrote:
> Thor;
>
>
> How about actually testing this systematically with some kind of
> survey? Could we for example
> each upload a video of a performance in our beloved live coding
> system and then design some
> kind of a survey where certain questions are asked with regards to
> people's understanding of code?
> (laypeople and coders alike)
>
>
> I'd say four groups of people are interesting, maybe five;
> *Musicians who also code (which could be further split to set aside
> those who know the particular system used)
> *Electronic musicians who don't code (who will understand terms like
> "filter", "harmonic", etc, and likely able to decode things like
> "SawOsc").
> *Coders who don't make electronic music (who will get terms like
> "while" and "if" as well as the general structure)
> *(Hopefully) interested lay-people who may or may not experience a
> real link between the code and the music.
>
> These groups might well have very different reactions that could be
> affected by very different aspects of the performance. even the way
> of presenting the material might matter. For example we here like
> web-casts but these might not be as interesting to the lay audience
> where there might be more of a interest in seeing the actual
> performer work or being able to debate the situation amongst each
> other.
>
> I don't think this would be so easy to research, especially
> considering factors like the secrecy often practised by electronic
> musicians and the neigh-religious defensiveness found in groups like
> proponents of certain editors, indentation styles to say nothing of
> analogue synthesis fanatics. We'd need to define very clearly what
> we would like to research exactly and how we would try to compensate
> for the various factors beyond that that might influence the way
> questions are answered.
>
> As valid as is might be to -for example- dislike computers in
> performance in general that need not matter if all we are curious
> about is the amount of "understanding" in the audience and exactly
> what is understood.
>
> If we'd like to do it properly this would be a very hard kind of
> research to perform correctly.
>
> Yours,
> Kas.
Received on Tue Oct 06 2009 - 13:26:40 BST