Live coding is a way of improvising music through live edits of source code, using dynamic language interpreters.
It requires artists to represent their work within a formal computer
language, using a higher level of abstraction than is the norm. Although
the only creative agents in live coding performance are human,
this abstraction makes the practice of interest to the field of computational creativity.
In contrast to live coding, generative art is output by programs unmodified during execution, which often have no user interface at all. The lack of control over such programs has led to a great deal of confusion around the question of authorship. When watching a piece of software generate art without guidance, onlookers ask "is the software being creative?" There is no such confusion with live coding, there is a human clearly visible, making all the creative decisions and using source code as an artistic medium. In fact there is no diference of
authorship between live coded and generative art. A programmer making generative art goes through creative iterations to, only after each edit they have to restart the process before reflecting on the result.
- Alex McLean and Geraint Wiggins
'Live Coding Towards Computational Creativity'
credits
released August 4, 2020
All sounds source in these tracks made with Sonic Pi. (Live recordings)
Sonic Pi is an open-source programming environment, designed to explore and teach programming concepts through the process of creating new sounds. It’s a free live coding synth for everyone created by Sam Aaron at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.
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