This article explores the similarities and differences between live coding and traditional music performances. The focus is on how bodily movements are expressed and whether pre-reflective processes may be activated during a live coding performance. While reports from practitioners vary on percepts of embodiment, the community is missing a theoretical background that reflects on practice. Understanding pre-reflective processes in live coding can benefit performance practices and tool development. As a live coder, I reflect on personal experiences and explore what I call ‘interactivity variations’, a term to denote different gestural manners of interactions during a performance. I observe patterns of embodiment among various live coders who use diverse performance systems from online videos. Out of 11 examples of performance systems, two cases demonstrate interactivity variations that can activate pre-reflective processes while another exploits direct manipulation. I present some implications for the patterns of bodily movement during a live coding performance and discuss how descriptive and prescriptive notation can be important and potentially influence our sensorimotor network. The article contributes a first account of a sensorimotor theory on live coding performances, reflecting on practice and embodied music cognition by presenting an aesthetic analysis of 11 online video examples.

In this article we discuss and critically analyse some colonial assumptions of live coding from the Global North in contrast to the practice of live coding in Latin America (LATAM). To do so, we first look at different colonial problems that arise from different contemporary approaches. This results in a recommendation to consider more complex conditions of power that exist in the Global South and shows how live coding can put into practice greater complexity in the social system of art that could contribute to the structural reinforcement of the next society, as well as a critique of the inherited tonality in different media. We then proceed to criticise other sound colonial assumptions by using the decolonial praxis-theory from LATAM live coders and propose different forms of sound decolonisation. Finally, we propose a way to reconcile the convergence of interests between live coding in Latin America, the ‘methodology’ of Black studies, and the ‘theory’ of sonic fiction. In the conclusion, we pose several critical questions that could serve as the basis for further investigations.

Live coding in Latin America has always been tied to educational access concerns and has been disseminated through the region by way of free workshops offered outside of academic institutions. Although there is significant live coding activity in Latin America, live coding outside of the European context has been little explored. We interviewed 11 female practitioners active in live coding nodes in Latin America to uncover the challenges this group faces in terms of access to music education and live coding with the aim of determining what strategies can be implemented to mitigate these challenges and promote diversity in the future. We also consider the role of collective activity and how interaction between live coding nodes in the region has led to the formation of safe spaces in which participants can share resources. The results show that live coding offers attractions for those who have faced challenges in music academia while those with non-music backgrounds found an introduction to sound creation through live coding. This suggests that live coding provides new opportunities for inclusiveness that could be taken advantage of by music academics.

This article examines the creative practice of Algorave music in Indonesia, with a focus on the Paguyuban Algorave community based in Yogyakarta. The Algorave movement, which has gained international recognition in recent years, has been observed to amalgamate with local culture, which created a unique musical approach. The research presented in this article delves into the distinctive musical approach of the Paguyuban Algorave community and aims to understand the reasons for its widespread acceptance compared with other forms of computer-aided music. The article also explores the future direction of the Algorave movement in Indonesia, considering the antecedents of Indonesian contemporary music that have contributed to its development in the country. Furthermore, this study investigates the influence of communal and hereditary factors on the community’s interactions, communication and knowledge-sharing.

This article is a text on the encounter of live coding with soundscape, soundart installation and soundwalking. This combination involves leaving the studio or a stage for live coding outside or moving to a participatory event inside a gallery, as in the case of an art installation. The article presents four cases of live coders and artists who have worked with this mixture. To understand how these artists combine live coding with these sound practices, I interviewed them and observed their works and performances in videos posted on internet platforms. The article shows that live coding sound, commonly performed within a concert space, can happen in listening, participation or walking contexts. The cases explore the sound of nature and the city to integrate it into the live coding practice of each artist. This shows that live coding can be expanded, combined or hybridised with other sound practices and establish a dialogue between different communities.

This article presents several scenarios in which a live coding environment called Paragraph was utilised to telematically play networked and geographically distributed hyperorgans. Situated within the framework of the Global Hyperorgan project, the TCP/Indeterminate Place Quartet have explored the affordances of the organ network through the concept of Tele-Copresence. By outsourcing certain dimensions of the parameter space of the Paragraph language to other members of the quartet, a shared instrumentality is enabled, where the organs are collaboratively controlled by means of this system. Rooted in a personal composer-performer practice and studied from the perspective of the live coder, the Paragraph system, adapted to the TCP/Indeterminate Place environment, can be understood as a modular system of human and non-human agents, into which the other musicians are patched. The distributed parameter space utilised, thus resembles a shared cantus firmus, a foundational, but dynamically changing, ecology for the live coder to play within.

In live coding, the code can be considered as an archetypal form of score that notates formal processes. We aimed at investigating the possibility of using graphic visuals as a complementary form of descriptive score by visualising sound events using different time representations. To this end, we devised two visualisation systems (Time_X and Time_Z). Time_X represents time along the x-axis, while in Time_Z the objects overlap along an imaginary z-axis. Based on our previous personal experience with the system, such forms of visual scores can help to develop new musicking strategies while live coding. In this article, we wanted to broaden such reflections, and we used them as probes in a study with three live coders. After tailoring the two systems to the usual practice of the three participants, we asked them to use the systems for three weeks and keep a diary. At the end, we interviewed them. Based on their comments, we present some reflections on the use of graphic forms of visualisation in live coding, on how they can support musicking process, and to what extent such visuals can be considered scores.

This article describes agent-based music live coding, an approach for music performance and composition based on programming a set of agents in a 2D plane. This style of programming draws from the tradition of agent-based models and facilitates interactive algorithmic control of data-driven sound synthesis methods such as wave terrain synthesis or corpus-based concatenative synthesis. The main elements are a ‘terrain’, which may be used to access different types of data, a set of agents and their trajectories, and a set of synthesis functions associated to agents. An implementation using the SuperCollider language is demonstrated.

Live coding is a celebrated practice that is used in many areas, combined with a variety of artistic fields. Code poetry is a form of poetry with many variations, all of which have a common rule: the code that is or produces the poem must compile without errors. The meeting point of live coding and code poetry seems to have not yet been thoroughly explored, leaving space for experimentation and research. Certain attempts have already been made, where live coding is either approached through natural language or used to break up and merge chunks of existing poems, forming new ones. Computer code has also been used to write deterministic opera librettos, following the code poetry paradigm. This article focuses on the literary and artistic attributes of code, on code poetry and on the existing attempts to combine it with live coding. It also highlights the narrative attribute of musical live coding to formulate a rationale for combining live coding with code poetry in a musical context. The goal is to examine the possibilities of this combination, as well as how this can be achieved, from a technical point of view.

This article discusses incorporating live coding as part of a new Foundation pathway for music production at a UK university that started in September 2022. The inclusion of live coding, using the application Sonic Pi, is situated alongside music production using a DAW, initially through the process of drum programming. The role of Sonic Pi is also to provide a means for producers to take their productions into the live performance space. This article’s contribution is in three areas. The first is to provide a short history of live coding at the current institution coupled with a longer account of my fragmented journey into live coding to provide some context. For the second discussion area, information about the foundation, its structure and how it fits into the overall degree programme is discussed. This section also includes some short code examples to illustrate the approach and links to video materials. For the last discussion area I outline an area of crossover between production and live coding which opens up a number of critical discussion points. This concerns the use of a breakbeat, what this means when used in productions, in live coding and when shipped with paid for or free software.

Creative activities often involve specific processes and techniques that reflect the unique nature of the activity. For live coders, these processes and techniques can be expressed as algorithms and functions in live coding languages. In many fields, these idiomatic processes are referred to as design patterns. Design patterns are important to understand because they can structure thought and direct users towards particular outcomes. This article examines the design patterns in live coding practices and languages, specifically focusing on the Live Coding Toolkit for Pure Data. Pure Data is a visual programming language, but few live coders have traditionally used it. This article explains how the Live Coding Toolkit allows Pure Data to effectively express the patterns of practice required for successful music live coding performance.

This article reports on a study to identify the new sonic challenges and opportunities for live coders, computer musicians and sonic artists using MIRLCa, a live-coding environment powered by an artificial intelligence (AI) system. MIRLCa works as a customisable worldwide sampler, with sounds retrieved from the collective online Creative Commons (CC) database Freesound. The live-coding environment was developed in SuperCollider by the author in conversation with the live-coding community through a series of workshops and by observing its use by 16 live coders, including the author, in work-in-progress sessions, impromptu performances and concerts. This article presents a qualitative analysis of the workshops, work-in-progress sessions and performances. The findings identify (1) the advantages and disadvantages, and (2) the different compositional strategies that result from manipulating a digital sampler of online CC sounds in live coding. A prominent advantage of using sound samples in live coding is its low-entry access suitable for music improvisation. The article concludes by highlighting future directions relevant to performance, composition, musicology and education.

This article describes the method of ‘dissective’ live coding, as developed through the artistic-research project Anatomies of Intelligence. In this work we investigate how live coding can be used as an approach for performative explorations of a data corpus and a machine learning algorithm operating on this corpus. The artistic framework of this project collides early Enlightenment-era anatomical epistemologies with contemporary machine learning, creating a fertile space for novel, embodied artistic methods to emerge. We engage audiences in an immersive, live-coded experience where image and sound are driven by our dissective approach, revealing the underlying rhythms and structures of a machine learning algorithm running live on an artist-made dataset. To support these performances we have developed a custom browser-based software, the Networked Theatre, used for both hybrid in-person/online audiovisual performances. In this article we describe this work and reflect on our experience as performers and audience feedback, which suggests that our dissective method of live coding, based on examining ‘ready-made’ algorithms, offers a unique experiential entryway into the bodies of machine learning and data corpi.

Co-creation strategies for human–machine collaboration have recently been explored in various creative disciplines and more opportunities for human–machine collaborations are materialising. In this article, we outline how to augment musical live coding by considering how human live coders can effectively collaborate with a machine agent imbued with the ability to produce its own patterns of executable code. Using machine agents allows live coders to explore not-yet conceptualised patterns of code and supports them in asking new questions. We argue that to move away from scenarios where machine agents are used in a merely generative way, or only as creative impetus for the human, and towards a more collaborative relationship with the machine agent, consideration is needed for system designers around the aspects of reflection, aesthetics and evaluation. Furthermore, owing to live coding’s close relationship with exposing processes, using agents in such a way can be a useful manner to explore how to make artificial intelligence processes more open and explainable to an audience. Finally, some speculative futures of co-creative and artificially intelligent systems and what opportunities they might afford the live coder are discussed.