On Tue, 2004-02-24 at 17:21, Fredrik Olofsson wrote:
> was it you alex or julian who brought up apple's new garage band
> program as a good opposite pole http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/
> it sure is ugly and scares me. crap music will be flooding. ableton
> live is another good case study i think.
It might well have been me. I'm not sure if we need to be negative in
directly criticising these applications. I'd feel uneasy about it for a
start - "some of my best friends use ableton live." I don't think I
could agree that loop-based live performances are necessarily bad. I
quite like loops.
> defining live-coding will probably be difficult and might take time.
> but couldn't we try to break down the problem and see what we can agree
> upon at the moment?
Yes!
> dare i suggest we all can agree with alex above on a notion of playing
> with open cards (in practice... project our screens during performance
> or if that not possible at least not hide away behind the screen
> looking 'very serious'). trying to share and communicate by
> visualising, in whatever way, what's going on in the computer and our
> minds?
Perhaps we can agree in "exposing the movement of the process" to the
audience, or allowing them to expose it for themselves (by dancing).
> i got another thought though...
> if you project any sequencer program it will be instantly obvious
> what's going on. on-screen knobs and faders bores you and after a few
> minutes you'll loose interest - maybe in the resulting music too. it's
> hard to be a virtuoso in ableton live.
> [...] isn't the thing about live coding the curiosity of how it really works?
> at least slub makes
> my brain spin trying to figure it out.
You probably don't manage to work it out though! Just have fun trying.
We've played to riotous dancefloors in amsterdam, berlin, paris,
barcelona and london without projecting our screens and people have
really got into the music as sound.
> i just love the expectation
> seeing a command executed and listening for its effect in the music.
> or which chunk of unreadable terminal output belongs to which sounds.
> i'm not proposing making things more difficult than needed but isn't it
> a trick of the trade to keep some secrets, arise curiosity (and thereby
> dialogue) and not letting the audience grasp the whole working process
> at once?
But I think there's a danger there of making a performance that only
programmers can appreciate. That's a bit like making art for art
critics, a bit self-defeating in my opinion.
> googling for 'live coding' brought this up
> http://www.eagle-software.com/snobol_review.htm witness of a delphi
> live coding happening.
> "If you thought that programming was always a personal, selfish
> pleasure, then you should have seen this: a British audience
> (correction: a British audience of programmers ) shouting out and
> competing with each other and actually cheering and bursting into
> spontaneous applause "
Hee!
alex (used to type faster until the RSI came along)
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Received on Sat Feb 28 2004 - 12:15:20 GMT