Back at the dawn of the 80s my first solo cassette was a piece called Random Noise. It lasted 30 minutes and was in effect a sequence of layered sine waves. Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks had released Sky Yen some weeks earlier and I had taken the idea and run with it; many of us start here with the sine wave and I took my place in the queue -- it was my stab at minimalism in the C30 C60 C90 Go! age. It, and its follow up (Drömm) got me into the Directory of the New Wave as "Unclassifiable", something I found (and still find) somewhat appealing.
In the 90s I was briefly part of a San Franscisco wirehead collective (wireheads are/were the hardware people amongst groups of predominantly Unix software hackers). I had a party trick which was to arrive with a cardboard box full of old scavenged radio parts and wires. I performed an improvisational piece where I hand wired a Sinewave oscillator on-the-fly, I built a second oscillator (a sawtooth generator (a bit harder, I resorted to cheating by dead bugging a Ti sound chip) and wired them together and created a variable offset that droned and shifted in a most pleasing manner (at least to my Red Stripe enhanced state of mind). This wasn't anything new. I got the inspiration watching a kid wiring up some flashing LED jewellery to impress a girl he was trying to date. After the "performance" I recall a large, bovine and someday hugely rich and influential Unix software guru walking up to me after the performance and complaining "that's not music, you weren't even playing a guitar".
This sort of thing is common. This happens to me a lot.
Ok, let's fast forward to 2009. Laptops have become the symbol of our era. They're cheap, ubiquitous to the point that Mums & Grans have one; software to make music is plentiful, easy and free and net.labels are proliferating at a rate faster than the music industry can co-opt them -- even this 10 year old Titanium Powerbook G4 laptop I am writing on plays music... it actually makes some damn fine sounds... so it makes absolute sense to me that eventually laptops find themselves on stage as an integral part of the performance.
Last night I popped over to Shunt Lounge buried in the subterranean cavern complex of arches under London Bridge Train and Tube Station. For anyone who's not attended this event before, Shunt Lounge is an "art space" -- pretty much anything goes as long as it's art. There's a bar, there's weirdness and bad art, there's good art, conceptual art, installation art and works in progress on show; some of it is pretty serious and thought provoking, there's Tom Waits (Alice) playing over the PA and in one corner of the space next to the bar (also selling Red Stripe) there is a gaggle of geeky boys and a few nerdy girls standing around a table furiously plugging-in USB cables.
The live coders were setting up.
My belief is we are at the beginning of a real new development in music that will change everything in the way music is played in the same way that DJs, Samplers, Punk, Jazz and concert pitch tuning have all done before it. Laptops on stage are not new, but laptops as the sole creative focus of a performance on stage is a whole other ball game, to a lot of people live coding will be absolutely new.
Live Coding is the laptop-and-software development of the trick with a cardboard box containing a battery and a bunch of electronic parts. Its a performance aesthetic that uses fairly common (albeit a bit difficult) sound producing software -- often in the form of established open source applications and audio servers such as Supercollider and ChucK whereby the performer starts with nothing... yer actual empty piece of paper... (or in our case a black screen), slowly the programmer builds up a sound and then adapts those sounds by directly programming and changing audio parameters via a command-line interface, writing and even compiling audio routines in real-time and subjecting the sounds they have just created to a barrage of on-the fly coded effects scripts.
A stream of quiet, intense looking people went up on stage with their laptops and performed. Thor Magnusson, Yeeking, Cane Toad Orchestra & Michele Pasin, MCLD, Slub, Jaganyax. Some alien sounding names In no particular order, each had their own laptop each had different sounds and performances and approaches and styles of coding. Some used their own languages others used whatever...
The performers were not charismatic in the cock-swinging "Rock God" sense, they didn't strut up and down posing with their gee-tarz like they do in Guitar Hero, they didn't even bawl "awrliight luuuunduuuun" into a microphone... hell there wasn't even a microphone! Nerds and geeks don't need it, they are never really swayed by showiness, we just want to see the frigging source code -- that's where the art is.
For the benefit of nerds like me the code is projected onto the screen so we can see, predict and even learn about what's happening. Those who are just here for the noise can also enjoy the text-as-lightshow aspect. Live coding is software development as performance art, its watching the process of inspiration and creation happen live on stage.
In essence, live coding is the intersection between software development, performance art and improvisation.
Some people have a hard time with the Laptop as a performance tool, even performers with laptops don't always see it as "playing the laptop" per se, and that's something best left for a far more philosophical argument later but watching someone sit on stage at a table, coding, following ideas, discarding them, building up new ones and shifting and returning to themes they just created is pretty much some of the most exhilarating and intellectually stimulating performance work I've been able to witness in the last 10 years or so.
This is a field that geeks and nerds like me can wholly appreciate. We make art with what we have to hand if we feel we can express ourselves with laptops and formal computer languages, then why the hell not?
If you're like the guy who complained it wasn't "real music" becuase it lacked some recognizable totem (such as a guitar) the I'm afraid its going to get worse. The proliferating and intermingling gaggle of laptopists, controllerists, livecoders and patchers -- none of whom have any interest in traditional instruments -- are going to seriously ****ing-well mess up your agenda.
Have a nice day.
ixi performing live
Cane Toad Orchestra performing live.
More info @
http://toplap.org/uk/
http://yaxu.org/
http://www.ixi-software.net/
In the 90s I was briefly part of a San Franscisco wirehead collective (wireheads are/were the hardware people amongst groups of predominantly Unix software hackers). I had a party trick which was to arrive with a cardboard box full of old scavenged radio parts and wires. I performed an improvisational piece where I hand wired a Sinewave oscillator on-the-fly, I built a second oscillator (a sawtooth generator (a bit harder, I resorted to cheating by dead bugging a Ti sound chip) and wired them together and created a variable offset that droned and shifted in a most pleasing manner (at least to my Red Stripe enhanced state of mind). This wasn't anything new. I got the inspiration watching a kid wiring up some flashing LED jewellery to impress a girl he was trying to date. After the "performance" I recall a large, bovine and someday hugely rich and influential Unix software guru walking up to me after the performance and complaining "that's not music, you weren't even playing a guitar".
This sort of thing is common. This happens to me a lot.
Ok, let's fast forward to 2009. Laptops have become the symbol of our era. They're cheap, ubiquitous to the point that Mums & Grans have one; software to make music is plentiful, easy and free and net.labels are proliferating at a rate faster than the music industry can co-opt them -- even this 10 year old Titanium Powerbook G4 laptop I am writing on plays music... it actually makes some damn fine sounds... so it makes absolute sense to me that eventually laptops find themselves on stage as an integral part of the performance.
Last night I popped over to Shunt Lounge buried in the subterranean cavern complex of arches under London Bridge Train and Tube Station. For anyone who's not attended this event before, Shunt Lounge is an "art space" -- pretty much anything goes as long as it's art. There's a bar, there's weirdness and bad art, there's good art, conceptual art, installation art and works in progress on show; some of it is pretty serious and thought provoking, there's Tom Waits (Alice) playing over the PA and in one corner of the space next to the bar (also selling Red Stripe) there is a gaggle of geeky boys and a few nerdy girls standing around a table furiously plugging-in USB cables.
The live coders were setting up.
My belief is we are at the beginning of a real new development in music that will change everything in the way music is played in the same way that DJs, Samplers, Punk, Jazz and concert pitch tuning have all done before it. Laptops on stage are not new, but laptops as the sole creative focus of a performance on stage is a whole other ball game, to a lot of people live coding will be absolutely new.
Live Coding is the laptop-and-software development of the trick with a cardboard box containing a battery and a bunch of electronic parts. Its a performance aesthetic that uses fairly common (albeit a bit difficult) sound producing software -- often in the form of established open source applications and audio servers such as Supercollider and ChucK whereby the performer starts with nothing... yer actual empty piece of paper... (or in our case a black screen), slowly the programmer builds up a sound and then adapts those sounds by directly programming and changing audio parameters via a command-line interface, writing and even compiling audio routines in real-time and subjecting the sounds they have just created to a barrage of on-the fly coded effects scripts.
A stream of quiet, intense looking people went up on stage with their laptops and performed. Thor Magnusson, Yeeking, Cane Toad Orchestra & Michele Pasin, MCLD, Slub, Jaganyax. Some alien sounding names In no particular order, each had their own laptop each had different sounds and performances and approaches and styles of coding. Some used their own languages others used whatever...
The performers were not charismatic in the cock-swinging "Rock God" sense, they didn't strut up and down posing with their gee-tarz like they do in Guitar Hero, they didn't even bawl "awrliight luuuunduuuun" into a microphone... hell there wasn't even a microphone! Nerds and geeks don't need it, they are never really swayed by showiness, we just want to see the frigging source code -- that's where the art is.
For the benefit of nerds like me the code is projected onto the screen so we can see, predict and even learn about what's happening. Those who are just here for the noise can also enjoy the text-as-lightshow aspect. Live coding is software development as performance art, its watching the process of inspiration and creation happen live on stage.
In essence, live coding is the intersection between software development, performance art and improvisation.
Some people have a hard time with the Laptop as a performance tool, even performers with laptops don't always see it as "playing the laptop" per se, and that's something best left for a far more philosophical argument later but watching someone sit on stage at a table, coding, following ideas, discarding them, building up new ones and shifting and returning to themes they just created is pretty much some of the most exhilarating and intellectually stimulating performance work I've been able to witness in the last 10 years or so.
This is a field that geeks and nerds like me can wholly appreciate. We make art with what we have to hand if we feel we can express ourselves with laptops and formal computer languages, then why the hell not?
If you're like the guy who complained it wasn't "real music" becuase it lacked some recognizable totem (such as a guitar) the I'm afraid its going to get worse. The proliferating and intermingling gaggle of laptopists, controllerists, livecoders and patchers -- none of whom have any interest in traditional instruments -- are going to seriously ****ing-well mess up your agenda.
Have a nice day.
ixi performing live
Cane Toad Orchestra performing live.
More info @
http://toplap.org/uk/
http://yaxu.org/
http://www.ixi-software.net/
