On Sat, 2006-07-08 at 13:26 +0100, Rob Myers wrote:
> My knowledge of music is pretty limited, but I think Jazz "standards"
> might possibly be a useful comparison. Something you (and the other
> musicians you are performing with) can start from, return to, and
> generally improvise around without having to start from scratch.
Yes the article I linked to covers much of this:
http://www.psych.unimelb.edu.au/staff/jp/improv-methods.pdf
Although the PDF isn't great quality the content is very interesting. I
haven't finished digesting it myself so can't offer a good summary.
However Jazz improvisation does feature in his review and I believe what
you're talking about here is the optional 'referent' in his model.
> I'm sure some people might see using libraries as less "live", but if
> the libraries consist of discoveries and experience from live coding
> then they still represent live code, code written live, and will help
> more and more complex live code to be written.
Once it's written and is not in a form easily changed then I suppose it
is as dead as a finished painting.
It might be useful to think of the difference between live and library
code as analogous to the difference between spoken and written language.
> In a way it is just a
> single program (or system) being written over a number of
> performances rather than starting from scratch each time. So tour-
> orientated coding rather than gig-oriented coding.
Yes this might work.
> The long term memory comparison is a good one. Treating performance
> as exploratory coding on top of existing achievements, finding
> (design) patterns and robustifying them as part of a library is also
> comparable to developing a musical style or a canon, concretised in
> code.
Yes I agree. At the moment I'm hoping to absorb such patterns into the
syntax of the language rather than a library, although I'm not
completely clear about the difference.
> Possibly the library is a kind of score, but a very indeterminate
> and unstable one.
Hm, not sure what you mean here.
alex
Received on Sat Jul 22 2006 - 09:04:57 BST