Confessions of a live coder

This paper describes the process involved when a live coder decides to learn a new musical programming language of another paradigm. The paper introduces the problems of running comparative experiments, or user studies, within the field of live coding. It suggests that an autoethnographic account of the process can be helpful for understanding the technological conditioning of contemporary musical tools. The author is conducting a larger research project on this theme: the part presented in this paper describes the adoption of a new musical programming environment, Impromptu, and how this affects the author’s musical practice

Changing musical emotion: A computational rule system for modifying score and performance

CMERS system architecture has been implemented in the programming language scheme, and it uses the improvised music programming environment with the objective to provide researchers with a tool for testing the relationships between musical features and emotion. A music work represented in CMERS uses the music object hierarchy that is based on GTTM's grouping structure and is automatically generated from the phrase boundary markup and MIDI file. The Mode rule type of CMERS converts a note into those of the parallel mode and no change in pitch height occurs when converting to the parallel mode. It is reported that the odds of correctness with CMERS are approximately five times greater than that of DM. The repeated-measures analysis of variance for valence shows a significant difference between systems with F (1, 17) = 45.49, p < .0005 and the interaction between system and quadrant is significant with F (3, 51) = 4.23, p = .01, which indicates that CMERS is extensively more effective at correctly influencing valence than DM. c 2010 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Lambda Calculus for Engineers

In pure functional programming it is awkward to use a stateful sub-computation in a predominantly stateless computation. The problem is that the state of the subcomputation has to be passed around using ugly plumbing. Classical examples of the plumbing problem are: providing a supply of fresh names, and providing a supply of random numbers. We propose to use (deterministic) inductive definitions rather than recursion equations as a basic paradigm and show how this makes it easier to add the plumbing

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

Stay Tuned: Whether Cloud-Based Service Providers Can Have Their Copyrighted Cake and Eat It Too

Copyright owners have the exclusive right to perform their works publicly and the ability to license their work to others who want to share that right. Subsections 106(4) and (5) of the Copyright Act govern this exclusive public performance right, but neither subsection elaborates on what constitutes a performance made “to the public” versus one that remains private. This lack of clarity has made it difficult for courts to apply the Copyright Act consistently, especially in the face of changing technology. Companies like Aereo, Inc. and AereoKiller, Inc. developed novel ways to transmit content over the internet to be viewed instantly by their subscribers and declined to procure the licenses that would have been required if these transmissions were being made “to the public.” However, while these companies claimed that their activities were outside of the purview of § 106(4) and (5), their rivals, copyright owners, and the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed. Likening Aereo to a cable company for purposes of § 106(4) and (5), the Supreme Court determined that the company would need to pay for the material it streamed. Perhaps more problematic for Aereo (and other similar companies) is the fact that the Court declined to categorize Aereo as an actual cable company, such that it would qualify to pay compulsory licensing fees—the more affordable option given to cable companies under § 111—to copyright holders. This Comment shows that, while the Court correctly ruled that companies like Aereo and AereoKiller should pay for the content transmitted, its failure to address whether Aereo is a cable company could frustrate innovation to the detriment of the public. It suggests, therefore, that these companies should be required to pay for the content that they transmit in the same way that cable companies do until Congress develops another system

Download, Stream, or Somewhere in Between: The Potential for Legal Music Use in Podcasting

Podcasting is an increasingly popular new digital technology with the potential to be a great conduit of expression. Currently, the use of music is limited in podcasting due in large part to uncertainty as to what rights must be licensed before copyrighted music can be used legitimately. This iBrief examines what legal rights are implicated by podcasting by analyzing U.S. copyright law and comparing related technologies. This iBrief concludes that onerous licensing requirements are unnecessary, and for podcasting to realize its potential, a simple licensing framework must be established

Visualising Music with Impromptu

This paper discusses our experiments with a method of creating visual representations of music using a graphical library for Impromptu that emulates and builds on Logo’s turtle graphics. We explore the potential and limitations of this library for visualising music, and describe some ways in which this simple system can be utilised to assist the musician by revealing musical structure are demonstrated

Algorithms as scores: coding live music

The author discusses live coding as a new path in the evolution of the musical score. Live-coding practice accentu- ates the score, and whilst it is the perfect vehicle for the performance of algorithmic music it also transforms the compositional process itself into a live event. As a continuation of 20th-century artistic developments of the musical score, live-coding systems often embrace graphical elements and language syntaxes foreign to standard programming languages. The author presents live coding as a highly technologized artistic practice, shedding light on how non-linearity, play and generativity will become prominent in future creative media productions

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

When users generate music playlists: When words leave off, music begins?

Music systems that generate playlists are gaining increasing popularity, yet ways to select songs to be acceptable to users is still elusive. We present the results of an explorative study that focused on the language of musically untrained end users for playlist choices, in a variety of listening contexts. Our results indicate that there are a number of opportunities for playlist recommendation or retrieval systems, particularly by taking context into account