Herding cats: observing live coding in the wild

After a momentous decade of live coding activities, this paper 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 the light of the extremely diverse manifestations of live coding activities, the problem of defining the practice is discussed, and the question raised whether live coding will actually be necessary as an independent category

The threnoscope: a musical work for live coding performance

This paper introduces a new direction in the field of artistic live coding where musical works are presented as pieces in the form of a live coding system. The system itself and the code affordances become equivalent to score system in an open musical work for strong improvisation

Automatic Music Composition using Answer Set Programming

Music composition used to be a pen and paper activity. These these days music is often composed with the aid of computer software, even to the point where the computer compose parts of the score autonomously. The composition of most styles of music is governed by rules. We show that by approaching the automation, analysis and verification of composition as a knowledge representation task and formalising these rules in a suitable logical language, powerful and expressive intelligent composition tools can be easily built. This application paper describes the use of answer set programming to construct an automated system, named ANTON, that can compose melodic, harmonic and rhythmic music, diagnose errors in human compositions and serve as a computer-aided composition tool. The combination of harmonic, rhythmic and melodic composition in a single framework makes ANTON unique in the growing area of algorithmic composition. With near real-time composition, ANTON reaches the point where it can not only be used as a component in an interactive composition tool but also has the potential for live performances and concerts or automatically generated background music in a variety of applications. With the use of a fully declarative language and an "off-the-shelf" reasoning engine, ANTON provides the human composer a tool which is significantly simpler, more compact and more versatile than other existing systems. This paper has been accepted for publication in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).Comment: 31 pages, 10 figures. Extended version of our ICLP2008 paper. Formatted following TPLP guideline

BitBox!:A case study interface for teaching real-time adaptive music composition for video games

Real-time adaptive music is now well-established as a popular medium, largely through its use in video game soundtracks. Commercial packages, such as fmod, make freely available the underlying technical methods for use in educational contexts, making adaptive music technologies accessible to students. Writing adaptive music, however, presents a significant learning challenge, not least because it requires a different mode of thought, and tutor and learner may have few mutual points of connection in discovering and understanding the musical drivers, relationships and structures in these works. This article discusses the creation of ‘BitBox!’, a gestural music interface designed to deconstruct and explain the component elements of adaptive composition through interactive play. The interface was displayed at the Dare Protoplay games exposition in Dundee in August 2014. The initial proof-of- concept study proved successful, suggesting possible refinements in design and a broader range of applications

Dynamic Procedural Music Generation from NPC Attributes

Procedural content generation for video games (PCGG) has seen a steep increase in the past decade, aiming to foster emergent gameplay as well as to address the challenge of producing large amounts of engaging content quickly. Most work in PCGG has been focused on generating art and assets such as levels, textures, and models, or on narrative design to generate storylines and progression paths. Given the difficulty of generating harmonically pleasing and interesting music, procedural music generation for games (PMGG) has not seen as much attention during this time. Music in video games is essential for establishing developers\u27 intended mood and environment. Given the deficit of PMGG content, this paper aims to address the demand for high-quality PMGG. This paper describes the system developed to solve this problem, which generates thematic music for non-player characters (NPCs) based on developer-defined attributes in real time and responds to the dynamic relationship between the player and target NPC. The system was evaluated by means of user study: participants confront four NPC bosses each with their own uniquely generated dynamic track based on their varying attributes in relation to the player\u27s. The survey gathered information on the perceived quality, dynamism, and helpfulness to gameplay of the generated music. Results showed that the generated music was generally pleasing and harmonious, and that while players could not detect the details of how, they were able to detect a general relationship between themselves and the NPCs as reflected by the music

Automatic Generation of Dynamic Musical Transitions in Computer Games

In video games, music must often change quickly from one piece to another due to player interaction, such as when moving between different areas. This quick change in music can often sound jarring if the two pieces are very different from each other. Several transition techniques have been used in industry such as the abrupt cut transition, crossfading, horizontal resequencing and vertical reorchestration among others. However, while several claims are made about their effectiveness (or lack thereof), none of these have been experimentally tested. To investigate how effective each transition technique is, this dissertation empirically evaluates each technique in a study informed by music psychology. This is done based on several features identified as being important for successful transitions. The obtained results led to a novel approach to musical transitions in video games by investigating the use of a multiple viewpoint system, with viewpoints being modelled using Markov models. This algorithm allowed the seamless generation of music that could serve as a transition between two composed pieces of music. While transitions in games normally occur over a zone boundary, the algorithm presented in this dissertation takes place over a transition region, giving the generated music enough time to transition. This novel approach was evaluated in a bespoke video game environment, where participants navigated through several pairs of different game environments and rated the resulting musical transitions. The results indicate that the generated transitions perform as well as crossfading, a technique commonly used in the industry. Since crossfading is not always appropriate, being able to use generated transitions gives composers another tool in their toolbox. Furthermore, the principled approach taken opens up avenues for further research