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 Mon Oct 05 2009 - 23:55:37 BST