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.

This paper explores participatory and socially engaged practices in ubiquitous music (ubimus). We discuss recent advances that target timbre as their focus while incorporating semantic strategies for knowledge transfer among participants. Creative Semantic Anchoring (ASC from the original in Portuguese) is a creative-action metaphor that shows promising preliminary results in collaborative asynchronous activities. Given its grounding in local resources and its support for explicit knowledge, ASC features a good potential to boost socially distributed knowledge. We discuss three strategies that consolidate and expand this approach within ubiquitous music and propose the label Radical ASC. We investigate the implications of this framework through the analysis of two artistic projects: Atravessamentos and Ntrallazzu.

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 fragments and processes Debris, a project developed to formalise the creative recycling of digital audio byproducts. Debris began as an open call for electronic compositions that take as their point of departure gigabytes of audio material generated through training and calibrating Demiurge, an audio synthesis platform driven by machine learning. The Debris project led us down rabbitholes of structural analysis: what does it mean to work with digital waste, how is it qualified, and what new relationships and methodologies do this foment? To chart the fluid boundaries of Debris and pin down its underlying conceptualisation of sound, this article introduces a framework ranging from archaeomusicology to intertextuality, from actor-network theory to Deleuzian assemblage, from Adornian constellation to swarm intelligence to platform and network topology. This diversity of approaches traces connective frictions that may allow us to understand, from the perspective of Debris, what working with sound means under the regime of machine intelligence. How has machine intelligence fundamentally altered the already shaky diagram connecting humans, creativity and history? We advise the reader to approach the text as a multisensory experience, listening to Debris while navigating the circuitous theoretical alleys below.

This article delineates a metaphysical concept, musical community, and considers its implications for material practices in the art world. It describes ways in which two theoretically distant categories of art music, namely, electroacoustic music and the concert-hall tradition, may converge given the emergent societal and technological shifts in the information age. The concepts of ‘networks’ and ‘reciprocity’, as developed by sociologists Manuel Castells and Marcel Mauss, respectively, constitute the theoretical lens for this analysis, which sees a number of musicological notions, including ‘musical society’ and ‘acousmatics’ reconsidered philosophically. Emphasis is placed, in lieu of the insular methodologies associated with the akousmatikoi, on broader Pythagorean society, its mythical links with present-day musical society, which are explored in relation to practical as well as structural proclivities permeating contemporary art music. These philosophical considerations are then used, so as to provide a general theory of récit music, a musical form designed by the author enabling creative employment of the impasses introduced in the information age. Finally, different reciprocities of the form with contemporary and traditional compositional philosophies are discussed, serving as an overview of the various theoretical and formal facets of récit music as methodology, approached in terms of three propositions.

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.

Perceived relationships between timbres are critical in electroacoustic music. Most studies assume timbres have fixed inter-relationships, but we tested whether distinct tasks change these. Thirty short sounds were used, from five categories: acoustic instruments, impulse responses, convolutions of the preceding, environmental sounds and computer-manipulated instrumental sounds. In Task 1, 46 non-musicians formed a ‘cohesive’ sonic ordering of unlabelled icons (sounds attached). In Task 2, they categorised the icons into four boxes. In Task 3 listeners separately ordered the sounds from each of Task 2’s boxes using the approach of Task 1. Tasks 1 and 2/3 revealed distinct orderings, consistent with conceptual flexibility. To analyse the orderings, we replaced conventional distance by adjacency measures, and described each system as a network (rather than spatial positions), confirming that the two task outcomes were distinct. Network analyses also showed that the two systems were mechanistically distinct and allowed us to predict temporally changing networks, modelling the observed networks as successive perceptions. Further simulated networks generated with the temporal model readily encompassed all possible pairings between the sounds and not just those we observed. The temporal network model thus confirms conceptual flexibility even in untrained listeners, clearly suitable for a composer to use.

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 addresses the precedence given to sound in musical analysis and argues that socially engaged composers might reconsider the importance they place on sonic output and instead pay greater attention to how we critically engage with the subjects that stimulate our musical practice. G. Douglas Barrett’s theorisation of music ‘after sound’ is established as a crucial methodology, one that provides an important discourse around critical engagements that have largely been neglected in favour of investigations into abstracted sonic materials. The vocabulary provided by Barrett is, in this article, used to meaningfully appraise the impact of a situated musical performance and its dialogue with society. Specifically, the three authors collectively explore the implications of Barrett’s writing for the conception, formation and evaluation of their own socially engaged compositional practices. Subsequently, this discussion also illustrates the methods by which Barrett’s approach is instrumentalised as a compositional device for socially engaged composition, rather than as an analytical tool for already completed works. Finally, the authors conclude with an alternative exploration of what ultimately lies beyond a ‘music after sound’, one that problematises the notion of a specialist composer today.

Sentire is a body–machine interface that sonifies motor behaviour in real time and a participatory, interactive performance in which two people use their physical movements to collaboratively create sound while constantly being influenced by the results. Based on our informal observation that basal social behaviours emerge during Sentire performances, the present article investigates our principal hypothesis that Sentire can foster basic mechanisms underlying non-verbal social interaction. We illustrate how coordination serves as a crucial basic mechanism for social interaction, and consider how it is addressed by various therapeutic approaches, including therapeutic use of real-time auditory feedback. Then we argue that the implementation of Sentire may be fruitful in healthcare contexts and in promoting general well-being. We describe how the Sentire system has been developed further within the scope of the research project ‘Social interaction through sound feedback–Sentire’ that combines human–computer interaction, sound design and real-world research, against the background of the relationship between sound, sociality and therapy. The question concerning how interaction is facilitated through Sentire is addressed through the first results of behavioural analysis using structured observation, which allows for a quasi-quantitative sequential analysis of interactive behaviour.

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.

In this article, we present Ear Talk – a co-composition and live performance project that enables remote music collaboration through technologically mediated systems. The Ear Talk project currently exists in two distinct implementations, one that repurposes YouTube’s live-streaming technology, and one that utilises a stand-alone website. Although Ear Talk was conceived prior to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the necessity for remote collaboration became more apparent during the lockdown, when a vast majority of live events and music concerts were cancelled. The Ear Talk project enables a socially distanced form of online musical collaboration and offers a platform through which to respond to such a crisis, and has grown to be adopted and presented by many different performing groups across the world. In addition to describing the technical implementations of these two systems, we discuss issues that arise from our participatory practice: from musical quality concerns in regard to social aesthetics and artistic ingenuity, to accessibility concerns when designing technologically mediated collaborative systems. Ear Talk embraces continuous musical loops as well as highly asynchronous (i.e., perpetual) collaborative paradigms among remote participants, which raises a conceptual inquiry as to which part of its sonic and social experience constitutes music in the end. Finally, we evaluate performer–audience relationships (i.e., hierarchical versus horizontal interactions) and the efficacy of the Ear Talk systems at enabling socially engaged co-composition.

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 examines works for live, interactive electronics from the perspective of complex dynamic systems, placing the human–computer interaction within a wider set of relationships. From this perspective, composing equates to constructing a complex system with the performer(s) and the computer as key players within a wider network of interdependence. Using the author’s own compositions as examples, this article investigates the utility of a system view on interactive, live electronics.

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.