Exposition

This paper describes the principles and the design of Vivace, a live coding language and environment built with Web technologies to be executed, ideally, in any ordinary browser. It starts by reviewing what motivated and inspired the creation of the language, in the context of actual performances. That leads to specifications of the language and how it is parsed and then executed using the recently created real-time Web Audio API. A brief discussion is presented on why the Web is an environment of interest to collaborative live coding and how it affects the performances. This work concludes by describing how Vivace has motivated the creation of "freak coding", a live coding sub-genre. In November of 2011, a live coding trio called FooBarBaz (Renato Fabbri 2011) unleashed its first presentation for a wide audience. Its performers were using two instances of 1

This paper describes the process involved when a live coder decides to learn a new musical programming language of another paradigm. The paper introduces the problems of running comparative experiments, or user studies, within the field of live coding. It suggests that an autoethnographic account of the process can be helpful for understanding the technological conditioning of contemporary musical tools. The author is conducting a larger research project on this theme: the part presented in this paper describes the adoption of a new musical programming environment, Impromptu, and how this affects the author’s musical practice.

EVA London 2016 Electronic Visualisation and the Arts, 2016

This paper/demonstration explores relationships between code, notation including representation, visualisation and performance. Performative aspects of live coding activities are increasingly being investigated as the live coding movement continues to grow and develop. Although live instrumental performance is sometimes included as an accompaniment to live coding, it is often not a fully integrated part of the performance, relying on improvisation and/or basic indicative forms of notation with varying levels of sophistication and universality. Technologies are developing which enable the use of fully explicit music notations as well as more graphic ones, allowing more fully integrated systems of code in and as performance which can also include notations of arbitrary complexity. This itself allows the full skills of instrumental musicians to be utilised and synchronised in the process. This presentation/demonstration presents work and performances already undertaken with these technologies, including technologies for body sensing and data acquisition in the translation of the movements of dancers and musicians into synchronously performable notation, integrated by live and prepared coding. The author together with clarinetist Ian Mitchell present a short live performance utilising these techniques, discuss methods for the dissemination and interpretation of live generated notations and investigate how they take advantage of instrumental musicians' training-related neuroplasticity skills.

This paper is exploring live-coding systems as self-expressive tools in utilizing creative activities that are focusing mainly on audiovisual em-bodiments. Live coding, as a performance tool is a particular activity that incorporates writing code on the fly with the shared experience of the activity being involved. Many creative platforms are equipped with exuberant tools available to the users to process materials. On the contrary live coding platforms are formed as blank canvases like a tabula rasa so that users may decide what to include for their requirements. As a consequence live coding motivates performers to develop authentic methods to convey their expressive ideas.

International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 2016

Within this article, live coding is conceived as a meletē, an Ancient Greek term used to describe a meditative thought experiment or exercise in thought, especially understood as a preparatory practice supporting other forms of criticaleven ethicalaction. Underpinned by the principle of performing its thinking through 'showing the screen', live coding involves 'making visible' the process of its own unfolding through the public sharing of live decision-making within improvisatory performance practice. Live coding can also be conceived as the performing of 'thinking-in-action', a live and embodied navigation of various critical thresholds, affordances and restraints, where its thinkingknowing cannot be easily transmitted nor is it strictly a latent knowledge or 'know how' activated through action. Live coding involves the live negotiation between receptivity and spontaneity, between the embodied and intuitive, between an immersive flow experience and split-attention, between human and machine, the known and not yet known. Moreover, in performing 'thinking-in-action', live coding emerges as an experimental site for reflecting on different perceptions and possibilities of temporal experience within live performance: for attending to the threshold between the live and mediated, between present and future-present, proposing even a quality of atemporality or aliveness.

In this article, I will analyse live coding technique under the magnifying lens of Ethnography. Using this perspective, I will try to delve into three main aspects: the effect on the audience/performer interaction of the screen projection during performances; the relationship between “hacker’s ethic”, borrowing a Pekka Himanen’s definition, and live coders community; how some researchers are trying to establish contacts between formal and informal music milieu. In my view, an Ethnographical approach can help people interested in live coding to contextualise some implication of this technique’s internal dynamics. Additionally, this perspective can be useful to build a bridge between some academic and non-academic computer music contexts, using live coding as glue between them.

Proceedings of New …, 2011

This paper introduces Improcess, a novel cross-disciplinary collaborative project focussed on the design and development of tools to structure the communication between performer and musical process. We describe a 3-tiered architecture centering around the notion of a Common Music Runtime, a shared platform on top of which inter-operating client interfaces may be combined to form new musical instruments. This approach allows hardware devices such as the monome to act as an extended hardware interface with the same power to initiate and control musical processes as a bespoke programming language. Finally, we reflect on the structure of the collaborative project itself, which offers an opportunity to discuss general research strategy for conducting highly sophisticated technical research within a performing arts environment such as the development of a personal regime of preparation for performance.

arXiv: Computers and Society, 2015

Live coding is a performance and creative technique based on improvised and interactive coding. Many recent endeavors have focused in live coding both because of aesthetics and as a way to alleviate performance drawbacks when the musical instrument is a computer. This paper describes the principles and the design of Vivace, a live coding language and environment built with Web technologies to be executed on web browsers. The approach is compelling by 1) allowing many performers to code simultaneously, 2) the synthesis of audio and video, 3) a very simple syntax, 4) being a multiplatform software. We also strive to contextualize Vivace by means of historical and usage summaries including a live coding sub-genre.

Computer Music Journal, 2014

After an eventful decade of live-coding activities, this article seeks to explore the practice with the aim of situating it in the history of contemporary arts and music. The article introduces several key points of investigation in live-coding research and discusses some examples of how live-coding practitioners engage with these points in their system design and performances. In light of the extremely diverse manifestations of live-coding activities, the problem of defining the practice is discussed, and the question is raised whether live coding is actually necessary as an independent category.

The advances on technologies have provided many tools that inspired new instructional models. Learners and instructors are experiencing a diverse environment where everyone can participate from anywhere in the world and share the same learning platforms. Although we already have some manuals, tutorials, and also MOOCs that can be useful for people who wants to learn Computer Music languages, the musical interaction is not offered in these solutions. In this paper we present an instructional model for computer music and live coding based on a cooperative live coding environment where participants can teach and learn through distributed pair programming. We also discuss the fundamental ideas and the tool used on this work during the first experiments.