Live coding in laptop performance

Abstract

Seeking new forms of expression in computer music, a small number of laptop composers are braving the challenges of coding music on the fly. Not content to submit meekly to the rigid interfaces of performance software like Ableton Live or Reason, they work with programming languages, building their own custom software, tweaking or writing the programs themselves as they perform. Often this activity takes place within some established language for computer music like SuperCollider, but there is no reason to stop errant minds pursuing their innovations in general scripting languages like Perl. This paper presents an introduction to the field of live coding, of real-time scripting during laptop music performance, and the improvisatory power and risks involved. We look at two test cases, the command-line music of slub utilising, amongst a grab-bag of technologies, Perl and REALbasic, and Julian Rohrhuber's Just In Time library for SuperCollider. We try to give a flavour of an exciting but hazardous world at the forefront of live laptop performance.

2004: On-the-Fly Programming: Using Code as an Expressive Musical Instrument

“…Additionally, performers have used runtime programmable elements during live performance and/or rehearsal. Examples go back as far as Jim Horton, Tim Perkis, and John Bischoff of The League of Automatic Composers, who tweaked live electronics with microcomputers (KIM's) during performance, and George Lewis, as well as the network group The Hub, who used languages like FORTH to modify their systems online, to more recent laptop computer musicians who construct and use various on-the-fly tools, including commandline, shell scripts, and homemade software tools [2].…”

“…We wish to sincerely thank Andrew Appel, Brian Kernighan, Ari Lazier, Nick Collins and the authors of [2] for their support. Also thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.…”

2015: Fourteen Years of NIME: The Value and Meaning of ‘Community’ in Interactive Music Research

“…In this manner, there is both a shared repertoire of practice-directed objects and a virtual space supporting opportunities for mutual engagement. More recently, laptop performance in academic contexts has gone through a process of formalisation in which performance practices have given rise to the 'live coding' (Figure 3) [12,11,28,48,46] and the 'laptop orchestra' (Figure 4) movements [17,41,47]. The sub-communities of live coding and laptop orchestras can be deemed proper CoPs.…”

Setting live coding performance in wider historical contexts

“…Feedback in live coding has been categorised as nested loops that include (1) feedback between the source code and running process, (2) manipulation feedback between programmer or artist and work in progress, (3) performance feedback involving external outputs, and (4) social feedback encompassing the audience or coperformers in a distributed system (Collins, McLean, Rohruber, Ward, 2003). A broad take on feedback in live performance shows it to be strongly bound up in particular cultural frameworks: what is deemed effective feedback or determinant action in one context might be viewed as incidental or ineffectual in another.…”