Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Live Coding

Open Access peer reviewed papers on live coding published at the 1st International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC) in Leeds

The Exploration of Static Typography for Expressing The Emotive Qualities of Music

This thesis explores how the pure form of static typography can express the emotive qualities of music. More specifically, how typefaces/letterforms and typographic compositions can produce emotive associations; and whether combining both aspects can enhance the emotive value. Emotion, typography and music are the three core subject areas of this research. Using music as the medium to elicit emotions, the findings from this thesis indicate that typeface/letterform is the most effective aspect of static typography to express emotive qualities, followed by the combination of both typographic aspects, and typographic composition which has the least impact for emotive connections. Five influential factors affecting the process of emotive association between music and static typography has been found: 1) Association of typographic attributes and design principles to emotive qualities, 2) Direct association using emotive terms and adjectives, 3) Connotation through personal memory and imagination, 4) Association to human voice and human touch, and 5) Association to phonetic properties of music. Chapter 2 of this thesis presents a review of the literature from the three main subject areas. It begins from the psychology of emotions and the importance of emotional attachment in design. Next, the chapter discusses the visual logic and creation of emotions through the pure anatomy of letterforms and typographic experimentation. The third section continues with how music can evoke emotions and the analogy between the properties of music and typographic characteristics. Chapter 3 4 presents original research of this thesis, initiating with a formative pilot study where three music sequences were selected and three corresponding typographic compositions designed by the researcher. The method of matching one sequence to one design piece was employed. Chapter 4 continues with original research, where modification was made to the methodology to obtain more specific results. Each aspect of static typography was investigated individually. The combination of both aspects was also tested to examine whether it can enhance the emotive impact. Findings from this research intend to present fresh realization to graphic designers, typographers and type designers, highlighting the tangible and enduring essence of static typography, with its power to engage the audience on an emotive level

Interactive Music and Synchronous Reactive Programming

This paper presents Skini, a programming methodology and an execution environment for interactive structured music. With this system, the composer programs his scores in the HipHop.js synchronous reactive language. They are then executed, or played, in live concerts, in interaction with the audience. The system aims at helping composers to find a good balance between the determinism of the compositions and the nondeterminism of the interactions with the public. Each execution of a Skini score yields to a different but aesthetically consistent interpretation. This work raises many questions in the musical fields. How to combine composition and interaction? How to control the musical style when the audience influences what is to play next? What are the possible connections with generative music? These are important questions for the Skini system but they are out of the scope of this paper that focuses exclusively on the computer science aspects of the system. From that perspective, the main questions are how to program the scores and in which language? General purpose languages are inappropriate because their elementary constructs (i.e., variables, functions, loops, etc.) do not match the constructions needed to express music and musical constraints. We show that synchronous programming languages are a much better fit because they rely on temporal constructs that can be directly used to represent musical scores and because their malleability enables composers to experiment easily with artistic variations of their initial scores. The paper mostly focuses on scores programming. It exposes the process a composer should follow from his very first musical intuitions up to the generation of a musical artifact. The paper presents some excerpts of the programming of a classical music composition that it then precisely relates to an actual recording. Examples of techno music and jazz are also presented, with audio artifact, to demonstrate the versatility of the system. Finally, brief presentations of past live concerts are presented as an evidence of viability of the system

Using Real-Time Data Flux In Art – The Mediation Of A Situation As It Unfolds: RoadMusic – An Experimental Case Study.

The practice driving this research is called RoadMusic. The project uses a small computer based system installed in a car that composes music from the flux of information it captures about the journey as it unfolds. It uses a technique known as sonification that consists of mapping data to sound. In the case of RoadMusic, this data capture is realtime, external to the computer and mobilised with the user. This dissertation investigates ways in which such a sonification can become an artistic form. To interrogate the specificity of an art of real-time it considers philosophical theories of the fundamental nature of time and immediacy and the ways in which the human mind ‘makes sense’ of this flux. After extending this scrutiny via theories of system and environment, it proceeds to extract concepts and principles leading to a possible art of real-time flux. Time, immediacy and the everyday are recurring questions in art and music, this study reviews practices that address these questions, essentially through three landmark composers of the twentieth century: Iannis Xenakis, John Cage and Murray Schafer. To gain precision in regards to the nature of musical listening it then probes theories of audio cognition and reflects on ways in which these can apply to real-time composing. The art of sonifying data extracted from the environment is arguably only as recent as the computer programs it depends on. This study reviews different practices that contribute towards a corpus of sonification-art, paying special attention to those practices where this process takes place in real-time. This is extended by an interrogation of the effect that mobility has on our listening experience. RoadMusic is now a fully functional device generating multi-timbral music from immediate data about its surroundings. This dissertation argues that this process can be an alternative to mainstream media systems; it describes how RoadMusic’s programs function and the ways in which they have evolved to incorporate the ideas developed in this thesis. It shows how RoadMusic is now developing beyond my own personal practice and how it intends to reach a wider audience

Spatial Poetics, Proprioception and Caring for Country in Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems

This thesis looks at the significance of space and place within Charles Olson’s poetics of the archaic postmodern, as a means of clearing a field within which a poetics of custodianship is enunciated. It applies and extends the concept of “nomadology”, formulated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to argue that Olson’s protagonist in The Maximus Poems can be seen as an exemplification of Pierre Joris’ concept of “a nomad poetics”. Olson’s triad of “topos, typos and tropos” helps structure the thesis and provides a means to approach and explain the Maximus gestalt as human geography: an organic entity arising from and embodying space in order to redefine place. This poesis needs a fully articulated sense of being and a poetics that can encompass human activity in a myriad of dimensions: physics and metaphysics, languages, images and sounds that express a full, corporal sense of the myths and history that Maximus embodies and re-enacts to ensure the survival of a liminal polis, or community of attentions. A specific scene of reading in this respect is Aboriginal Australia, as the thesis expands on tropes that connect ancient cultures to postmodern poetic concerns, and demonstrates that Olson’s ultimate aim is akin to that of recreating country itself. It should be noted that the recreation of country and ownership of the ground upon which Olson’s poetry and poetics are enacted remain the preserve of the original owners, and that his sense of recreation and expansion of a poetic field is not to be conflated with a desire for appropriation, while acknowledging that these operations are inevitably taking place in colonised locations. The thesis concludes by proposing that with due respect to these considerations, the Maximus project remains of vital relevance to a twenty-first century, international readership

Explorations in experimental formalism

Poets who write on the innovative, or experimental edge of their field and often outside of it, do not always know how to describe their writing and its products to others. This paper will be an attempt by Judy Kendall, who leads the English and Creative Writing BA Programme at Salford University, UK, to explore what it means to write under the title of Experimental Formalism as a poet and short fiction writer specialising in experimental visual text. The paper will present her understanding of what it is she does under the auspices of Experimental Formalism, and what she means by that term.Los poetas que escriben en el margen innovador o experimental de su campo y a menudo fuera de él, no siempre saben cómo describir su poesía y sus frutos a los demás. En el presente artículo, Judy Kendall, quien lidera el English and Creative Writing BA Programme de Salford University en el Reino Unido, se propone contribuir a esas explicaciones explorando qué significa escribir bajo el título de Experimental Formalism, como poeta y autora de historias cortas especializándose en el texto visual-experimental. El artículo presenta su visión de lo que hace bajo los auspicios del Experimental Formalism y de lo que ella quiere decir con ese término

Vortex

Vortex. Visual Aural Textual. One language is an interdisciplinary art form — improvising the visual, aural and textual mediated by technology and revealing that one language exists at their intersection. These three separate art forms have largely been held by our culture as distinct subjects. They have been connected in a documentary way by our most popular communications media, film and television — yet they have less frequently been used as pure interdisciplinary form with which to explore their own synergy. Perhaps the oldest form to express the singularity of sound text and image is the ancient OM chant. As a performance medium and compositional theory, Vortex is a catalyst for a deeper level of communication than we experience with any one or two media. It is documented by means of performance, gallery presentation, research and publication

Beyond the Electronic Connection: The Technologically Manufactured Cyber-Human and Its Physical Human Counterpart in Performance: A Theory Related to Convergence Identities

This thesis is an investigation of the complex processes and relationships between the physical human performer and the technologically manufactured cyber-human counterpart. I acted as both researcher and the physical human performer, deeply engaged in the moment-to-moment creation of events unfolding within a shared virtual reality environment. As the primary instigator and activator of the cyber-human partner, I maintained a balance between the live and technological performance elements, prioritizing the production of content and meaning. By way of using practice as research, this thesis argues that in considering interactions between cyber-human and human performers, it is crucial to move beyond discussions of technology when considering interactions between cyber-humans and human performers to an analysis of emotional content, the powers of poetic imagery, the trust that is developed through sensory perception and the evocation of complex relationships. A theoretical model is constructed to describe the relationship between a cyber-human and a human performer in the five works created specifically for this thesis, which is not substantially different from that between human performers. Technological exploration allows for the observation and analysis of various relationships, furthering an expanded understanding of ‘movement as content’ beyond the electronic connection. Each of the works created for this research used new and innovative technologies, including virtual reality, multiple interactive systems, six generations of wearable computers, motion capture technology, high-end digital lighting projectors, various projection screens, smart electronically charged fabrics, multiple sensory sensitive devices and intelligent sensory charged alternative performance spaces. They were most often collaboratively created in order to augment all aspects of the performance and create the sense of community found in digital live dance performances/events. These works are identified as one continuous line of energy and discovery, each representing a slight variation on the premise that a working, caring, visceral and poetic content occurs beyond the technological tools. Consequently, a shift in the physical human’s psyche overwhelms the act of performance. Scholarship and reflection on the works have been integral to my creative process throughout. The goals of this thesis, the works created and the resulting methodologies are to investigate performance to heighten the multiple ways we experience and interact with the world. This maximizes connection and results in a highly interactive, improvisational, dynamic, non-linear, immediate, accessible, agential, reciprocal, emotional, visceral and transformative experience without boundaries between the virtual and physical for physical humans, cyborgs and cyber-humans alike.College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, Department of Theatre & Dance at the University of Texas at Austi