Hi Alex and all--
Wow, reading that clarifies for me why I find livecoding so interesting.
I have a fair amount of prior musical performance experience. What I've
always liked most about it was that conversational aspect of it, the
exchange with others. Late-bound computer programming environments had
some of that feel, too (especially the message-oriented one I usually
use). But the topic of conversation was never as interesting. :)
So bringing them together makes perfect sense to me. And the main
nicety of the programming environment (never having to stop or restart)
turns out to be critical. The conversations can continue and evolve ad
infinitum. I think not having to restart goes a long way toward
diffusing the tension of programming-in-the-moment. It does rather feel
like painting to me, too (as Dave mentioned). To run with that allusion
a bit, I guess having to restart a livecoding programming conversation
would be like having to copy bits of previous work to a new canvas
whenever one wants to make a significant change to a painting.
It's no surprise to me that the system I'm developing is "literally"
conversational (using English). It's just a hack to make the language of
the conversation more accessible to the audience. (I wrote "musique
litterale", which is a sort of musical interactive fiction.)
By the way, right now I'm experimenting with including individual
audience members in the conversation, by bridging my system with AOL
Instant Messenger. I have my doubts, both because audience members would
probably be typing using cellphones, which is cumbersome, and because
musique litterale normally listens character-by-character, not
line-by-line like most IM systems. But we'll see. :)
-C
--
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
www.netjam.org
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]
Received on Wed Aug 17 2005 - 18:17:18 BST