Editors’ Notes

As three of those involved in an early attempt to capture inchoate activity in live coding (Collins et al. 2003), it is good to meet a decade later as guest editors of this special issue. The following work demonstrates the vibrancy of live coding research, following a curated DVD in Computer Music Journal 35(4) that represented a snapshot of live coding practice in 2011.

Live coding is a form of exploratory programming: Rather than taking the programmer’s task as mere preparation or implementation, it focuses on programming itself as a public or epistemic practice. In recent years, live coding has proliferated as an artistic field in particular, with many practitioners working in the context of computer music. This special issue accompanies the tenth anniversary of the Temporary Organisation for the Promotion of Live Algorithm Programming (TOPLAP), which was set up on 14 February 2004 as a way of promoting and linking investigations in this new field. (In fact, TOPLAP’s instigation was just an accidental offshoot of the Changing Grammars symposium, held in 2004 at the Hamburg Art Academy, at the initiative of Renate Wieser and Julian Rohrhuber.) Despite the word “temporary” in its name, continued interest in live coding has left the organization unable to disband.

Over the past ten years, live coding has grown into a movement that celebrates computer programming as a creative, social activity—as a way to think aloud. This has felt like a reconnection with the work of Doug Engelbart and his contemporaries from half a century ago, carrying the spirit of computer programming as exploration and open experimentation. For live coders, computer languages allow freedom to follow through ideas that would otherwise be beyond imagination. Such curiosity and engagement have always been present in programmer culture, but live coding has given us a vehicle to bring this enthusiasm out in public through live, collective music-making. We are now at the point where stories about people making, enjoying, and dancing to live-coded music are regularly featured in international media, and we are hopeful that programming is slowly becoming understood as something we can do together, for each other, in the moment.

TOPLAP logo by Adrian Ward.

As founding practitioners and researchers in this field, we are proud of what has already been achieved. However, with some humility, we see the prime motivation for live coding not in what we can do now, but in the promise of what we could do in the future. We sense that there are things we must achieve to reinvent computer programming as accessible, expressive, collaborative, and more able to support creative human thought. This promise explains why so many musicians have turned to making their own live-coding languages and environments, dedicating some of the best years of our lives to a hazy but compelling set of ideas. This is a huge undertaking that amounts to a collective leap of faith, and this collection brings together many of the underlying ideas in a single volume for the first time.

The emergence of live coding has been surprising to some—but in retrospect, it is strange that computation, as musical material, has to a large extent been hidden and neglected in computer music performance. By bringing computation to the foreground and subverting its allegedly purely instrumental character, live coding has helped fill this gap. By sitting on the fence between the atemporal dimensions of composition and the temporal entanglements of improvisation, it has even set the stage for rethinking the conceptions behind formalization and algorithms. Being an intricate matter, music seems a perfectly suited subject for investigations between planned action and the unfolding of a plan, between thought and sensory perception, and as such, it has always been a productive challenge at the boundary with computer science. Making the planning action an integral part of performance practice, and in turn, integrating the realization in the activity of programming, live coding will remain an Archimedean point of computer music, both in its difficulties and its possibilities.

One of the most characteristic impressions one can get from the past ten years...