Live coding, sometimes referred to as on-the-fly programming,Wang G. & Cook P. (2004
"On-the-fly Programming: Using Code as an Expressive Musical Instrument"
In ''Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME)'' (New York: NIME, 2004). just in time programming and conversational programming, makes programming an integral part of the running program. It is most prominent as a

performing arts The performing arts are arts such as music, dance, and drama which are performed for an audience. They are different from the visual arts, which involve the use of paint, canvas or various materials to create physical or static art objects. P ...

form and a creativity technique centred upon the writing of

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

and the use of interactive programming in an improvised way. Live coding is often used to create sound and image based

digital media In mass communication, digital media is any media (communication), communication media that operates in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital content can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, an ...

, as well as light systems, improvised

dance Dance is an The arts, art form, consisting of sequences of body movements with aesthetic and often Symbol, symbolic value, either improvised or purposefully selected. Dance can be categorized and described by its choreography, by its repertoir ...

and poetry, though is particularly prevalent in computer music usually as improvisation, although it could be combined with algorithmic composition. Typically, the process of writing source code is made visible by projecting the computer screen in the audience space, with ways of visualising the code an area of active research. Live coding techniques are also employed outside of performance, such as in producing sound for film or audiovisual work for interactive art installations. Also, the interconnection between computers makes possible to realize this practice networked in group. The figure of live coder is who performs the act of live coding, usually "artists who want to learn to code, and coders who want to express themselves" or in terms of Wang & Cook the "programmer/performer/composer". Live coding is also an increasingly popular technique in programming-related lectures and conference presentations, and has been described as a "best practice" for computer science lectures by Mark Guzdial.

Techniques

A range of techniques have been developed and appropriated for the purposes of live coding.

Representation and manipulation of time

The specific affordances of time-based media and live interaction with code has led to a number of novel developments and uses in programming language design. Through mutual embedding of imperative and declarative subsystems, the programming language SuperCollider permitted to build a library that allows incomplete and provisional specifications which can be rewritten at runtime. The

ChucK Chuck () is a masculine given name or a nickname for Charles or Charlie. It may refer to: People Arts and entertainment * Chuck Alaimo, American saxophonist, leader of the Chuck Alaimo Quartet * Chuck Barris (1929–2017), American TV produce ...

language introduced an approach to "strongly timed" programming in 2002, embedding precision timing into control flow through a concise syntax. "Temporal recursion" was a term initially coined in relation to the

Impromptu An impromptu (, , loosely meaning "offhand") is a free-form musical composition with the character of an ''ex tempore'' improvisation as if prompted by the spirit of the moment, usually for a solo instrument, such as piano. According to ''Allgeme ...

programming environment. Technical elements within a programming environment continue to locate compressors and recursion solutions, but timing had been a major issue. While the general form of a temporal recursion, being any asynchronous function recursion through time, is available to any event driven system, Impromptu has placed a special emphasis on this particular design pattern, making it the centre piece of the concurrency architecture on that platform. Temporal recursion had repeatedly been used in SuperCollider and has since been implemented in the

Fluxus Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers, and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental performance art, art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finishe ...

environment. Another functional approach to the representation of time is shown in the Tidal pattern

DSL Digital subscriber line (DSL; originally digital subscriber loop) is a family of technologies that are used to transmit digital data over telephone lines. In telecommunications marketing, the term DSL is widely understood to mean asymmetric di ...

, which represents patterns as combinators operating over functions of time, similar to techniques in functional reactive programming.

Multi-user programming and shared memory

Multi-user programming has developed in the context of group music-making, through the long development of the ''Republic'' system developed and employed by members of the network band ''PowerBooks Unplugged''. Republic is built into the SuperCollider language, and allows participants to collaboratively write live code that is distributed across the network of computers. There are similar efforts in other languages, such as the distributed tuple space used in the Impromptu language. Additionally Overtone, Impromptu and Extempore support multi-user sessions, in which any number of programmers can intervene across the network in a given runtime process. The practice of writing code in group can be done in the same room through a local network or from remote places accessing a common server. Terms like laptop band, laptop orchestra, collaborative live coding or collective live coding are used to frame a networked live coding practice both in a local or remote way.

Organizations

TOPLAP (The (Temporary, Transnational, Terrestrial, Transdimensional) Organisation for the (Promotion, Proliferation, Permanence, Purity) of Live (Algorithm, Audio, Art, Artistic) Programming) is an informal organization formed in February 2004 to bring together the various communities that had formed around live coding environments. The TOPLAP manifesto asserts several requirements for a TOPLAP compliant performance, in particular that performers' screens should be projected and not hidden. On-the-fly promotes live coding practice since 2020. This is a project co-funded by the Creative European program and run in Hangar, ZKM, Ljudmila and Creative Code Utrecht.

Research

A number of research projects and research groups have been created to explore live coding, often taking interdisciplinary approaches bridging the humanities and sciences. First efforts to both develop live coding systems and embed the emerging field in the broader theoretical context happened in the research project Artistic Interactivity in Hybrid Networks from 2005 to 2008, funded by the

German Research Foundation The German Research Foundation ( ; DFG ) is a German research funding organization, which functions as a self-governing institution for the promotion of science and research in the Federal Republic of Germany. In 2019, the DFG had a funding bud ...

. Further, the Live Coding Research Network was funded by the UK

Arts and Humanities Research Council The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), formerly Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), is a British research council, established in 1998, supporting research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities. History The Arts a ...

for two years from February 2014, supporting a range of activities including symposia, workshops and an annual international conference called International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC).

Examples of live coding environments

* Csound * Extempore *

* Glicol *

* ixi lang *

Max Max or MAX may refer to: Animals * Max (American dog) (1983–2013), at one time purported to be the world's oldest living dog * Max (British dog), the first pet dog to win the PDSA Order of Merit (animal equivalent of the OBE) * Max (gorilla) ...

Pharo Pharo is a Cross-platform software, cross-platform implementation of the classic Smalltalk-80 programming language and runtime system. It is based on the OpenSmalltalk virtual machine (VM) named Cog, which evaluates a dynamic, Reflective progr ...

* Pure Data * Scratch * Sonic Pi * SuperCollider *

TidalCycles TidalCycles (also known as Tidal) is a live coding environment which is designed for improvising and composing music. Technically, it is a domain-specific language embedded in the functional programming language Haskell, and is focused on the g ...

* Sardin

References

{{Reflist

External links

Official TOPLAP website

Live Code Research Network

International Conference on Live Coding
Algorave Experimental music Live music Computer music Computer programming Digital art User interface techniques