Understanding live coding events

ABSTRACT

As an arts practice, live coding has strong roots in musical performance, and the fact that its ‘liveness’ requires the performer to write and modify algorithms in real time [Collins, N., A. McLean, J. Rohrhuber, and A. Ward. 2003. “Live Coding in Laptop Performance.” Organised Sound 8 (3): 321–330] means that it is often treated as a kind of music improvisation. Organised live coding has now passed its tenth year [Magnusson, T. 2014. “Herding Cats: Observing Live Coding in the Wild.” Computer Music Journal 38 (1): 8–16], and during this decade it has been manifested in a variety of contexts. Whilst there is a growing body of research addressing aspects of live coding from the coder’s perspective, little is known about the audiences for these events. Using an online questionnaire, this paper seeks to explore the motivations, experiences, and responses of live coding audiences and to examine their perceptions of the projected source code during live coding events. We aim to shed new light on the role of openness and technology in live coding performances, providing rich context for fuller understanding of this emerging practice and its impact on audience experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Live coding
• audience
• Algorave
• community
• learning
• code
• multimodal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Karen Burland is Associate Professor of music psychology and Head of the School of Music at the University of Leeds. Her research interests relate to musical identities, the career transitions of musicians and on live music audiences and she supervises doctoral work primarily in these areas. She is currently a university student education fellow and is investigating the ways in which undergraduate and postgraduate students engage with, and perceive, employability activities during university and beyond. Her book Coughing and Clapping: Investigating Audience Experience, edited with Stephanie Pitts, was published in December 2014. Karen has published widely in well-respected journals and has participated in numerous interdisciplinary research collaborations. Karen’s more recent research focuses on ecological approaches to creativity, understanding interaction and creativity in studio collaborations, investigations into the impact of institutional values on musicians’ psychological and musical development, in addition to on-going concerns with audience research.

Alex McLean (http://slab.org) is a live coding musician, digital artist, and interdisciplinary researcher based in Sheffield, UK. He is currently completing a research and teaching fellowship at the School of Music, University of Leeds, and beginning work on the five-year PENELOPE project lead by Dr Ellen Harlizius-Klück, at the Deutsches Museum Research Institute, investigating weaving as technical mode of existence. Alex is active across the digital arts, including co-founding the TOPLAP and Algorave live coding movements, the international conferences on Live Interfaces (ICLI) and Live Coding (ICLC), the Sonic Pattern symposia, the Festival of Algorithmic and Mechanical Movement, and the Dorkbot electronic art meetings in Sheffield and London. He also created the TidalCycles live coding environment, now an active free/open source project.

Notes

1 An algorave is defined as embracing ‘the alien sounds of the raves from the past, and introduc[ing] alien, futuristic rhythms and beats made through strange, algorithm-aided processes’ (Algorave.com/about, n.d.)