On Mon, 2004-07-19 at 16:26, Dave Griffiths wrote:
> I had fun, a slight panic with a dodgy mixer, but after that I got into
> it.
Sorry about that - the problem wasn't with the mixer in the end but with
my dodgy soldering further along the chain... With all the problems
that had caused the projection completely escaped my mind.
> The whole thing was improvised, live coded from scratch (still not
> sure if my lsystems rule writing really counts as code). I found that in
> the heat of the performance I actually had a lot more time to do things
> than I had imagined.
I was really pleased with my live coding, it was much more fun
programming from scratch than using the "one i'd made earlier"
approach. The results were quite simplistic, mainly building rhythms
out of modulos and sinewaves... But as a first (and second)
from-scratch live programming performance, it did feel like a whole new
world opening up.
It was a lot of fun performing with french Alex, we'd been practising
together for a while until I made the sudden decision to stop using
pre-prepared code. The following (and final) practice session was far
better than the previous ones. I was able to react to what he was doing
in a far more satisfying way than before. We did four run-throughs in
that session, each one being really quite different.
French Alex is actually more of a pro bass player I believe, it was the
first time he'd played drums in front of a live audience. He was
sampling and processing his drum hits with max/msp, and as a side effect
we stayed in perfect sync (when we wanted to).
> I failed, however, to get my screen projected - too much else to worry
> about I guess. Next time.
Sorry for my part in this - had had a lot of problems with missing
channels in the first few performances which we traced to my dodgy
soldering which had deteriorated since last year!
> A mate of mine recorded the gig, am I allowed to upload it Alex?
Of course - they're your recording rights! To be honest I took a
recording too, I have the entire festival (apart from some bits lost
through a couple of power outages) as uncompressed wavs.
Sadly I was running about too much to listen to your set properly,
although I listened to it today. Ace! A few of the others at state51
paused from their work to listen, raise their eyebrows and mumble
approval too.
I listened to your set too Tom, it rocked out, and I enjoyed that
infinite loop you mentioned...
There's still a couple of weeks left of the placard festival, maybe we
should make a live coding placard session before its over? Linked via
the Internet, with toplap-ratified video streams of our desktops. More
info at
http://placard7.ath.cx/
> I dunno much about it (and would have to get time off work, which might
> be tricky then) - really got the live performance bug now though so....
The runme/dorkbot citycamp is 25/26/27 august in Aarhus, Denmark. It'll
be a nice three days of workshops, presentations and performances. The
two days before, the 23rd and 24th, will see the readme software art
conference, more of an academic conference with presentation of papers
including the TOPLAP one. They are like two parts of the same thing
with a lot of crosstalk, but I guess a lot (most?) people will not
attend both. The free accommodation is officially full up but there may
be a chance to fit you in - let me know asap if you want me to ask on
your behalf. Likewise I think that the travel funds are used up but
there's no harm asking.
More info at
http://readme.runme.org/
> I find the keyboard/mouse combination pretty useless for expression
> personally, although I am stuck with it. I also think they make it
> difficult to express process to an audience. I'm really interested in
> moving code away from text (or boxes and wires) and into more immediate
> forms.
On the other hand I think text has some advantages that other forms
might not. Text can be startlingly evocative, and have a rhythm and
structure that relates well with music. It can be as precise or vague
as you like, and the different extremes may be traversed with the
introduction or omission of a single word.
But yes, as far as writing text and in particular code is concerned, it
is rather slow. I'm a really slow writer. The Perl language is a lot
faster than many computer languages to use, but even so, typing an
algorithm to make a rhythm can be a lot slower than hitting it out a
drum. However by writing that text you're invoking actions that are
much faster than a drummer.
One way of looking at it is that writing code is an extremely fast form
of expression, it just has a lot of latency!
> I have some embryonic ideas of a system where you would set up chain
> reactions with big primary coloured lego blocks (a bit like a build your
> own mr driller level):
> http://digilander.libero.it/calimerosegg/gallery/gbadvance/mrdrill2.gif
>
> Would such a thing still be code? What does "code" mean? A turing
> complete language?
I read somewhere recently (probably wikipedia) that turing complete
computers are impossible to build because they require infinite memory.
In any case, turing completeness seems an arbitrary constraint.
I think our earlier discussions led us to realise that it is probably
not possible to strictly define the scope of toplap code. So we have to
content ourselves with defining live coding as working closely with the
composition of the music, rather than being almost completely abstracted
away from it by consumer software.
There were a lot of ableton live performances at the london placard.
Because the performances were back to back and only 20 minutes long, we
had four stages, so up to three acts can be setting up while the fourth
person plays. At one point all four stages had laptops running ableton
live!
See ya,
alex
Received on Tue Jul 20 2004 - 00:39:53 BST
