#toplap

Worldwide nonstop stream of around 168 performances over 84 hours, from 12:00, 14 Feb 2019 until 23:59:59 17 Feb 2019 (UTC, please click for your local times).

Celebrating 15 years of the live coding community, first formed at the Changing Grammars symposium, 14th February 2004. We wrote this shortly after. Now there are bazillions of live coding environments and a thriving worldwide community of practice.

[Please welcome Alex McLean as this week's guest writer. Alex is a musician from Yorkshire, UK who specializes in live coding of music performances. He has written a PhD on "Artist Programmers and Programming Languages for the Arts" and is a co-founder of TOPLAP (Temporary Organisation for the Promotion of Live Algorithm Programming). Alex is @yaxu on Twitter and his website is at http://yaxu.org. - Tobias]

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Music is an aspect of Human life which touches almost everyone, present within all hearing cultures. The field of music psychology is an exciting place, but music is still little understood. One recent, straightforward way of defining music is in terms of recordings; music is something you can buy, and then listen to. Digital music-making technology has grown up in this context, where tracker, sequencer, and even live production software has maintained a dichotomy between producer and consumer. Music is something that is made, perhaps alone in the stereotypical bedroom studio, for someone else to listen to later.

If we think of music not in terms of product, or even sound, but just in terms of Human activity, then music technology begins to take a different shape. Christopher Small reframed music activity as Musicking, an expansive definition which takes in not only the playing of instruments, but also ticket purchases, the gathering in a concert hall atrium, and all the other music rituals. Against this background, the iTunes music store is not a way of acquiring music, but is actually music itself. The wider experience of music reduced to a tabular interface centred around consumer choice. The same applies to Ableton Live, Cubase, Cakewalk Pro, and Buzz tracker; if the production and distribution of these software systems is musical activity, then their programmers are the master musicians of our times. Where they are anonymous, we could call them folk musicians, making music which is not for people but of the people.

Generative music is perhaps the purest of music technologies, and based on the idea of autonomous music. Wind-chimes are the classic tangible example, played by the wind, beyond the realms of Human activity. But if music is Human activity, then the music of windchimes is not created by the wind, but the windchime maker, and the passerby taking the time and imagination to find music in the experience of listening to it.

The ideology of autonomous generative music has leaked into music technology in surprising ways, and left us in some strange situations. As deadmau5 points out, there is a huge disparity between pressing play on a computer and the frenzied, engaged reaction of a large crowd. This situation seems unfair, not to the audience who are having a great time, but the performers who are left looking for self-justification (or in the case of deadmau5, honourable self-deprecation). Perhaps there is a better way of approaching technology.

The principle of technological determinism might suggest that the music technology we currently have is inevitable, but that isn't the case. Computers are language machines, for writing text about text, and yet through great, painful and difficult work we use them to construct simulations resembling something like the world outside. If software *did* determine music technology, then perhaps it would look more like the fringe activity of live coding. Live coders write and manipulate text, interpreted live into sound, which is experienced as music. This is a form of improvised algorithmic music, where a piece of music is described using higher-order, abstract constructions, while that description is interpreted live by a computer[1]. In this way live coders have blended music and software-making, both often considered as end-products, into a single activity.

Live coding is not really a leap up, but rather a return to roots, establishing new foundations of human-computer interaction, using programming languages in end-user interaction. You can find example videos, and freely-downloadable live programming languages, through the TOPLAP website.

Live coding is a family of approaches to music-making, used within a wide range of musical genres. It is also applied to live video animation such as VJing (for example using Fluxus or LivecodeLab). Classically, a live coding performance will involve one or more improvising musicians with a live audience. An audience is not necessary though, we might live code as part of a private drumming circle, or even alone, either as a solo exploration or as part of a compositional process towards a fixed recording.

If an audience is involved, they are generally able to see the live coders' screens, in accordance with the TOPLAP manifesto. This is often achieved by projecting the screens. The audience are not expected to read or understand the code in order to enjoy the music however, any more than we need to understand guitar-playing technique to enjoy guitar music. Showing screens simply opens up the Human activity of live coding, so that people feel included and have a way into the music.

While there is on-screen movement, it is also true that live coding is generally not the most active of performances. The difference between the audience and performers can be stark; everyone is engaged, but on two very different levels:

The disparity between the livecoder, fixed on their screen, and a dancing audience before them is strange enough. Everyone in a state of creative flow, and everyone somehow engaged in the dance as a group. The emerging Algorave movement emphasises this activity of the audience in algorithmic music, including (but not only) through live coding performance. Just as the original rave movement was driven by anonymous producers and DJs, the contemporary algorave encourages creative listening. Not the still, deep listening of Pauline Oliveros, but listening with the whole body. Establishing a ground in complex, polyrhythmic output of musical algorithms is easy if you dance to it.

So this has been a bit of a ramble, but hopefully goes some way towards motivating embedding the expressive power of computer language in an active music experience. It's been a great pleasure sorting through some of these thoughts, but there is a lot more sorting through to do... This is of course the function of blogging, and I hope you'll contribute some of your thoughts to the mix below!

Thanks for reading, and thanks also to Tobias for having me as a guest.

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[1] An electronic computer isn't strictly necessary in live coding performances, for example Nick Collins and Kate Sicchio have both used Human dancers to take the role of a computer, as a form of live algorithmic choreography.

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