> I'm curious to hear about how all of you subjectively experience the music
> whilst coding in a live situation. I myself feel that I loose connection
> with the
> music when going into the code too much so I tend not to code too much in
> live situation although I can't resist sometimes. But I might be bad
> at multitasking
> or splitting the consciousness into both following the music and the
> algorithm.
The attention you can allocate to different threads is an interesting
question, and perhaps it's even worth running a few psychological
experiments on live coders ; )
One suspicion might be that the 'note-level' instrumental musician is more
able to attend to individual notes than the 'sequence-level' live coder.
But I suspect this would be too much of crude separation, and we can attend
to different time slices as we go.
Yet, we've all felt those moments where programming/thinking takes over
entirely and the background music we had on is lost, only to reappear
halfway through the next track
Of course, attentional resourcing is one thing you could practice. I think
many of these issues came up before (in the thread Thor was prominent in
before), where we confessed that live coding is conductor level and
fundamentally different to gestural musicianship. I think I mentioned the
cerebellum then too and the benefits (and indeed, requirement) that certain
tasks are automated as much as possible for effective instrumental
musicianship (as Paul has brought up in this thread). It may well be that
the amount you can automate is more restricted with live coding, because
more has to remain conscious and is not encapsulatable in physical motor
memory or the like (though their are surely other mechanisms of storing
cerebral 'licks').
On a personal level, I'm certainly very conscious of this issue, and during
those August practice sessions tried to keep in touch with both algorithmic
and music critical modes. But it can definitely be hard to be 50/50 in the
two, and is much more likely navigated by self scheduling of time! It's
also probably one of our many open questions about human performance
limits.
best
N
Received on Wed Jan 10 2007 - 14:42:42 GMT