Month: September 2013
Dagstuhl seminar on collaboration and learning through live coding
A wonderful time at Dagstuhl last week. Aspects of the seminar has already been covered very nicely in blogs by Mark Guzdial, and Dave Griffiths. I’ve tended to blog about live coding over on the TOPLAP blog, but over the coming days I’ll be unravelling my thoughts about live coding here. To start with though, here’s a couple of thoughts about the Dagstuhl format.
Dagstuhl seminars fit well with live coders, because organisers are encouraged to organise on-the-fly, reacting to themes as they arise and develop through the workshop. A solid week of discussion passed very quickly, but despite the relaxing surroundings was remarkably hard work. This was in part because I was suppressing a cold throughout, to varying levels of success, but mostly because it was all so interesting, with discussions starting over breakfast and flowing through the day and into the evening.
The whole thing re-invigorated a whole host of my interests in live coding, and brought together many perspectives into a field that we could share in. As Mark and Dave have noted, this was a rather cross-disciplinary group of cross-disciplinary people, and although the odd technical discussion probably did exclude some participants, we managed to drift between discussions about education, engineering, philosophy, politics and music without hitting too many obstacles. The involvement of cross-disciplinary people – artist-programmers, engineer-ethnographers, textile-mathematicians, computer science-philosophers, and so on, meant misunderstandings were quickly identified and bridged.
More soon..
Tidal cycles
I’ve started a twitter feed called @tidalcycles, with minimal tidal programs and their output. I’ll try to add one a day, but lets see how things go. Here’s the first couple:
brak $ let x = "bd [sn [[sn bd] sn]]*1/3" in interlace (sound $ slow 3 $ x) (sound $ every 3 (append "[bd]*6") x)
weave 4 (speed $ (1+) sinewave1) [density 4 $ every 5 ((0.25 <~) . rev) $ striate 16 $ sound"[bd sn/2]/2", sound "bd [~ hc]*3"]
Colourful texture
Texture v.2 is getting interesting now, reminds me of fabric travelling around a loom..
Everything apart from the DSP is implemented in Haskell. The functional approach has worked out particularly well for this visualisation — because musical patterns are represented as functions from time to events (using my Tidal EDSL), it’s trivial to get at future events across the graph of combinators. Still much more to do though.
Radio 5 live – Outriders
I had a nice chat with Jamillah Knowles from Outriders on Radio 5 live the other day, about live coding and algoraves. It’s now available as a podcast, from about 12m50s of the 11th September 2013 edition.
Vocal
A quick improv from Sheffield:
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/108970936″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
Here’s the state of my editor at the end:
d1 $ slow 2 $ sound "bd [sn sn bd]/2"
let x = density 2 $ striate' 8 0.75 $ sound (slow 4 $ "[bd bd/4] [ht mt lt]") in
d2 $ stack [every 3 rev $ every 4 (0.75 <~) x
|+| pan "0.2",
every 4 rev $ every 3 (0.5 <~) x
|+| pan "0.8"
]
|+| speed "1"
|+| shape "0.6"
d4 $ every 4 (density 2) $ echo 0.5 $ brak $ every 3 (0.25 <~) $ sound "[future,odx,bd]*3"
|+| shape "0.7"
let perc = 0.2 in
d3 $ slow 2 $ whenmod 10 12 (echo 0.25) $ density 2 $ sound (pick "~ [operaesque]" (slow 5 $ run 24))
|+| slow 16 ((begin $ (*(1-perc)) sinewave1) |+| (end $ (+perc) sinewave1))
|+| speed (slow 2 "0.75 0.7")
|+| pan "0.6"
|+| shape "0.6"
let perc = 0.2 in
d4 $ slow 3 $ every 2 (rev) $ whenmod 10 12 (echo 0.25) $ density 2 $ sound (pick "~ [operaesque]*3" (slow 10 $ run 16))
|+| slow 16 ((begin $ (*(1-perc)) sinewave1) |+| (end $ (+perc) sinewave1))
|+| speed "0.75"
|+| pan "0.4"
|+| vowel "i"
hush
d6 $ whenmod 10 12 (density 2) $ whenmod 12 4 (rev) $ slow 2 $ sound "[futuremono]*3 [odx/3]"
d7 $ whenmod 6 4 (0.25 <~) $ every 4 (density (3/2)) $ slow 2 $ sound "[jungle/2]*2 [jungle/3]*2"
|+| shape "0.7"
d7 $ (whenmod 2 4 ((|+| speed "0.9") . rev) $ every 2 (0.25 <~) $ sound "odx [sn/2 ~ sn/2]")
d2 silence
d8 $ ((slow 8 $ double (0.25 <~) $ striate 12 $ sound "[diphone2/1 ~ diphone2/3]*4")
|+| (slow 4 $ speed ((*) "[2 1] 1.5" ((+0) ((+0.4) (slow 4 $ sinewave1))))))
|+| vowel "i"
d9 $ slow 2 $ sound "[[odx]*4]/3 [[odx]*4 [odx]*8]/3"
|+| speed "1"
|+| cutoff "0.04"
|+| resonance "0.7"
|+| shape "0.8"
bps 1
Extending human ability
I don’t always enjoy praise, but it’s really great when commentators see through the cold reality of live coding or algorave and get at the promise that motivates what we’re doing.
Here’s a comment by a reddit user called Tekmo from a few months back, which I think is about the promise of a more embodied approach to the practice of programming:
I think the entire premise of this project is really brilliant. Right now it’s probably not immediately inspiring because it takes a minute or so to switch between patterns for an average user, but imagine somebody getting REALLY good at improving on this, with their own custom library of one or two-letter function names and performing by constantly improvising patterns every few seconds while programming at lightning speed.
But the real reason I think this is brilliant is because this is sort of what I always imagined programming was about: extending human ability. I feel like the super-heroes of the future will be programmers that command an impressive array of remote machinery as if it were an extension of their own body.
Here’s an excerpt from a nice blog post by DuBose Cole which to me hints at a cultural tipping point when more people start programming:
Events like Algorave highlight that by making more people creators through programming, we don’t just get new technical creations, but social and cultural ones as well. Algorave features electronic music created by algorithms programmed on the fly for a crowd. Revellers seem to attend due to either an interest in how the music is created, a particular love of electronic music, or just to have a party. An idea like Algorave takes the image of coding as a solitary experience and moves it forward, making the programmer a collaborative and immediate creator, as well as bit of a rock star.
What the idea highlights however, is that learning to create with code is less about the skill itself and more about what you do with it. Pushing coding literacy is only the beginning. Coders are creating an ever expanding culture of creation, which anyone with a basic appreciation or skill for programming can join in with. The increasing simplicity with which people can learn coding has not only changed who can create, but also the scope of what’s being created.
Brilliant stuff.