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

Virtual Agents in Live Coding: A Short Review

Although this special issue has been scheduled for 15 March 2021, it is still unpublished: https://econtact.ca/call.html (eContact! 21.1 — Take Back the Stage: Live coding, live audiovisual, laptop orchestra…)AI and live coding has been little explored. This article contributes with a short review of different perspectives of using virtual agents in the practice of live coding looking at past and present as well as pointing to future directions

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

BOEUF: A Unified Framework for Modeling and Designing Digital Orchestras

International audienceOrchestras of Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs) enable new musical collaboration possibilities, extending those of acoustic and electric orchestras. However the creation and development of these orchestras remain constrained. In fact, each new musical collaboration system or orchestra piece relies on a fixed number of musicians, a fixed set of instruments (often only one), and a fixed subset of possible modes of collaboration. In this paper, we describe a unified framework that enables the design of Digital Orchestras with potentially different DMIs and an expand-able set of collaboration modes. It relies on research done on analysis and classification of traditional and digital orchestras, on research in Collaborative Virtual Environments, and on interviews of musicians and composers. The BOEUF framework consists of a classification of modes of collaboration and a set of components for modelling digital orchestras. Integrating this framework into DMIs will enable advanced musical collaboration modes to be used in any digital orchestra, including spontaneous jam sessions

Orchidea – Os meta-instrumentos da Orquestra de Ideias

A prática musical coletiva por meio de dispositivos computacionais ocorre em grupos de música contemporânea, orquestras de computadores portáteis e também das orquestras de telefones celulares. Tais grupos musicais envolvem tecnologia e criação musical no desenvolvimento de seus meta-instrumentos e também na concepção de suas peças musicais. Este artigo apresenta a criação da Orchidea, uma orquestra de ideias, e a criação de dois conjuntos de instrumentos musicais digitais utilizando para isto duas abordagens tecnológicas distintas. Na primeira abordagem, utilizamos a plataforma Android e a API libpd para a criação de instrumentos musicais digitais enquanto que na segunda abordagem utilizamos HTML5 e javascript. O artigo avalia como as duas abordagens podem auxiliar a prática musical colaborativa utilizando computadores portáteis e celulares como instrumentos musicais. Estas abordagens são avaliadas de acordo com critérios que envolvem tanto a criação dos instrumentos quando a sua execução em grupo

Orchidea – Os meta-instrumentos da Orquestra de Ideias

A prática musical coletiva por meio de dispositivos computacionais ocorre em grupos de música contemporânea, orquestras de computadores portáteis e também das orquestras de telefones celulares. Tais grupos musicais envolvem tecnologia e criação musical no desenvolvimento de seus meta-instrumentos e também na concepção de suas peças musicais. Este artigo apresenta a criação da Orchidea, uma orquestra de ideias, e a criação de dois conjuntos de instrumentos musicais digitais utilizando para isto duas abordagens tecnológicas distintas. Na primeira abordagem, utilizamos a plataforma Android e a API libpd para a criação de instrumentos musicais digitais enquanto que na segunda abordagem utilizamos HTML5 e javascript. O artigo avalia como as duas abordagens podem auxiliar a prática musical colaborativa utilizando computadores portáteis e celulares como instrumentos musicais. Estas abordagens são avaliadas de acordo com critérios que envolvem tanto a criação dos instrumentos quando a sua execução em grupo

Collaborative interfaces for ensemble live coding performance

This research is a practice-led investigation into collaborative user interfaces within the practice of live coding; the act of writing computer code for generating improvised music live in front of an audience. It examines the impact of user interface design parameters on group creativity and explores the roles of data, text, and programming languages as media for musical communication. Utilising a multi-faceted research method that combines iterative “participatory design” (Spinuzzi, 2005) with performance-led “research in the wild” (Benford et al., 2013), this research couples ethnographic and autoethnographic observations to gain insight into the practice of ensemble live coding and inform software design. Three novel collaborative interfaces have been developed as part of this research that explore various facets of musical collaboration in live coding. Each interface was developed through an iterative and reflexive methodology focused on user-centred design and was employed in a cyclical process of artistic practice and refinement based on user evaluation and in-depth study. The first interface, entitled Troop, is a shared text editor that allows multiple performers to collaborate on the same single body of code together. The second, CodeBank, explores how private working in a collaborative context affects creativity and improvisation. Finally, PolyGlot, combines multiple live coding languages into a single collaborative interface that enables live coding musicians to play together, regardless of their knowledge of languages. As well as these three graphical interfaces, the functionality of an existing live coding language, FoxDot, was extended to help facilitate the sharing of musical information within an ensemble. Each interface was used in live performance by The Yorkshire Programming Ensemble and evaluated through group interview sessions that examined the themes of immediacy, trust, and risk with regards to both human-computer interaction and intra-ensemble communication as well as the experience of personal- and group-flow states

AS LIÇÕES APRENDIDAS COM A ORCHIDEA

Atualmente, o avanço tecnológico realizou diversas transformações nas formas de se utilizar o computador, principalmente na área musical, onde o computador passou a ser utilizado para se criar música, compor ou até mesmo ensinar determinados conceitos musicais. No Brasil, ainda existe uma certa barreira a ser quebrada em relação ao ensino de música / tecnologia devido a escassez de instituições voltadas para tal área. Desta forma, este trabalho tem como objetivo apresentar dois estudos de caso realizados em nossa universidade: a criação de um disciplina de Introdução a Computação Musical e seus respectivos efeitos em relação à sua transdisciplinaridade e ao aprendizado dos alunos; e a criação de um grupo de arte digital chamado Orchidea, o qual tem se desenvolvido ao longo de alguns anos, proporcionando um conhecimento coletivo entre os alunos e professores

Apps, Agents, and Improvisation: Ensemble Interaction with Touch-Screen Digital Musical Instruments

This thesis concerns the making and performing of music with new digital musical instruments (DMIs) designed for ensemble performance. While computer music has advanced to the point where a huge variety of digital instruments are common in educational, recreational, and professional music-making, these instruments rarely seek to enhance the ensemble context in which they are used. Interaction models that map individual gestures to sound have been previously studied, but the interactions of ensembles within these models are not well understood. In this research, new ensemble-focussed instruments have been designed and deployed in an ongoing artistic practice. These instruments have also been evaluated to find out whether, and if so how, they affect the ensembles and music that is made with them. Throughout this thesis, six ensemble-focussed DMIs are introduced for mobile touch-screen computers. A series of improvised rehearsals and performances leads to the identification of a vocabulary of continuous performative touch-gestures and a system for tracking these collaborative performances in real time using tools from machine learning. The tracking system is posed as an intelligent agent that can continually analyse the gestural states of performers, and trigger a response in the performers' user interfaces at appropriate moments. The hypothesis is that the agent interaction and UI response can enhance improvised performances, allowing performers to better explore creative interactions with each other, produce better music, and have a more enjoyable experience. Two formal studies are described where participants rate their perceptions of improvised performances with a variety of designs for agent-app interaction. The first, with three expert performers, informed refinements for a set of apps. The most successful interface was redesigned and investigated further in a second study with 16 non-expert participants. In the final interface, each performer freely improvised with a limited number of notes; at moments of peak gestural change, the agent presented users with the opportunity to try different notes. This interface is shown to produce performances that are longer, as well as demonstrate improved perceptions of musical structure, group interaction, enjoyment and overall quality. Overall, this research examined ensemble DMI performance in unprecedented scope and detail, with more than 150 interaction sessions recorded. Informed by the results of lab and field studies using quantitative and qualitative methods, four generations of ensemble-focussed interface have been developed and refined. The results of the most recent studies assure us that the intelligent agent interaction does enhance improvised performances

Improving User Involvement Through Live Collaborative Creation

Creating an artifact - such as writing a book, developing software, or performing a piece of music - is often limited to those with domain-specific experience or training. As a consequence, effectively involving non-expert end users in such creative processes is challenging. This work explores how computational systems can facilitate collaboration, communication, and participation in the context of involving users in the process of creating artifacts while mitigating the challenges inherent to such processes. In particular, the interactive systems presented in this work support live collaborative creation, in which artifact users collaboratively participate in the artifact creation process with creators in real time. In the systems that I have created, I explored liveness, the extent to which the process of creating artifacts and the state of the artifacts are immediately and continuously perceptible, for applications such as programming, writing, music performance, and UI design. Liveness helps preserve natural expressivity, supports real-time communication, and facilitates participation in the creative process. Live collaboration is beneficial for users and creators alike: making the process of creation visible encourages users to engage in the process and better understand the final artifact. Additionally, creators can receive immediate feedback in a continuous, closed loop with users. Through these interactive systems, non-expert participants help create such artifacts as GUI prototypes, software, and musical performances. This dissertation explores three topics: (1) the challenges inherent to collaborative creation in live settings, and computational tools that address them; (2) methods for reducing the barriers of entry to live collaboration; and (3) approaches to preserving liveness in the creative process, affording creators more expressivity in making artifacts and affording users access to information traditionally only available in real-time processes. In this work, I showed that enabling collaborative, expressive, and live interactions in computational systems allow the broader population to take part in various creative practices.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145810/1/snaglee_1.pd