By Jason Palmer
Science and technology reporter, BBC News
It might just be the most conceptually complex way of making music that modern man has yet devised.
But that is the challenge of live coding – the process of writing computer code, in real time, to compose and play music or design animations.
"It’s not just a passive process, not just someone creating sounds, which is the problem with electronic music – because people don’t really see what it is that the musicians are doing," said Dave Griffiths.
Dave is a live coder and a performer in a night of live coding held in a south London pub, organised by the collective Toplap.
"Live coding brings the audience closer; they can see that you’re making something in front of them."
The furious coding is also projected on a screen for the audience, making the programming as much – or more – of the performance as the music it codes for.
Bug bare
Live coding eschews the normal route of developing computer code, which starts with writing a program in a "high-level" language – one that looks not too far removed from English.
Then, the programmer compiles it, meaning it is converted by another program into a language not too far removed from the 1s and 0s of computing.
Then they run it. If anything should go wrong – and anyone who has ever done any programming will know how frequent this is – they get nothing out.
A crash. Epic fail.
Because the software that live coders use is designed for a compile-free, real-time use, the performers face that prospect much less.
But it does happen, Dave tells me. "That’s what keeps it exciting," he said.
A crash means a deadly uncomfortable silence in front of an expectant audience, which on the night includes quite a few people who have simply stumbled upstairs into the pub’s function room to see what live coding is.
Jamming frequency
Up first is Chris McCormick, whose performance is a world premiere.
Live coding has its own, custom-made programming languages, some of them which are as simple as a 1970s computer interface, with lines of code entered onto a black screen.
Others might be more visual, with musical directions encoded as shapes that are arranged freehand on a screen.
"It might not be any easier to understand but it’s visually more interesting than just text," Dave said.
"But then there’s also something nice about the purity of just having lines of code."
Chris is a fan of the more visual software, but he follows the live coding purist’s tradition of starting off with a blank screen.
As he adds shapes corresponding to sounds, filling them in with numbers that finely tune their timbre or frequency, his stage fright is not in evidence.
He said that live coding is like building the computer programs that are commonly used to make electronic music; it is "one more level of abstraction" from the music itself.
"Making boring techno music is really easy with modern tools," he said, "but with live coding, boring techno is much harder."
As if to prove the point, the performances after Chris’s held no full-fledged, boring techno.
Dave and his collaborator Alex McLean perform a live-coding duet, each of them running independent programs. They listen to each other’s output and work separately but together in a way that is conceptually not so different from two saxophonists "trading fours".
Engaging
Matthew Yee-King and his partner Nick Collins have opted to stray from standard live coding this evening, instead performing their "algorhythmic choreography".
Instead of code entered on the screen resulting in sound, it results in Nick performing dance moves. It’s less high-tech and more conceptual performance art.
But they share the others’ passion about what it is that live coding taps into.
"I’ve done all sorts of things with a computer and a stage, but [live coding] feels like it’s really native to computing," said Matthew.
"It’s like a virtuosic exploration of the guts of the machine, in the same way that a piano virtuoso engages with the machine they’re using.
"You’re deeply engaging with the machine in a way that you don’t if you’re using someone’s ready-made software."
And this seems to be the point; no one has come expecting to make or to hear heroically composed, massively melodic and moving music.
It’s more an exposition of what can be done starting from absolutely nothing with a novel, stripped-down set of sonic tools.
Dave sums it up: "It’s such a new thing, and we don’t know if we’re any good at it – it may well be that a new generation comes along and just blows us away".
The group is looking into doing a tour of sorts by playing in planetariums across the country, with the first in September at Plymouth Planetarium.
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