On 06/01/2008, Julian Rohrhuber <rohrhuber_at_uni-hamburg.de> wrote:
and please forgive my usage of
> 'they' meaning 'humans'.
No offence intended. I should explain that I'm Dutch and the Dutch tend to
use "we" in such contexts. "We" can mean all or most humans so I might write
"we are so cruel and short sighted" if I wanted to lament some perceived
aspect of human-nature. English and particularly US English doesn't
generally do this that way and I found some people get confused, take
offence and want to be excluded from this entirely abstract company. So; I
copied your usage of "they" and only used the quotes to be on the safe side.
To rephrase my question: Literature may
> serve as a means to abstract from action, as to reason about action.
> Symbolic algebra has evolved as a system of reasoning about such
> reasoning, or action about action, and it has left the realm of
> calculation of results of this action. Would you say that live coding
> is about returning to the beautiful presence of calculating action
> and its results? For me it is about the impossibility of such a
> return.
> --
That's a good question. I'd like to hear more about how this affects your
practice and enjoyment of livecoding. I have to say though that for me so
far the calculations have been secondary to the communicative aspects. I
find that there are many musical structures that are fairly easy to express
in code yet are inconvenient to "explain" to the computer using a
traditional interface like a piano roll. I did find and enjoy that some
seemingly simple calculations resulted in pleasant patterns that would have
been hard to express in either piano rolls or normal language (for example
when instructing a fellow band member) but I'm not sure this is as aspect
of the return to the beautiful presence of the calculating action you are
talking about.
In general I think I find your question very interesting but so far too
abstract to give a concrete answer. It could be argued that livecoding is a
extremely abstract way of making music but personally and perhaps because of
this I like to keep it as practical as I can.
I realise explaining concepts like yours in immediate and practical terms
may be a big request to make but I'd very much appreciate a attempt.
Yours,
Kas.
Received on Sun Jan 06 2008 - 12:05:43 GMT