Re-Engaging the Body and Gesture in Musical Live Coding Salazar, S; ARMITAGE, JDK; New Interfaces for Musical Expression
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Re-engaging the Body and Gesture in Musical Live Coding Salazar, S; ARMITAGE, JDK; New Interfaces for Musical Expression © The Author(s) 2019 For additional information about this publication click this link. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/41803 Information about this research object was correct at the time of download; we occasionally make corrections to records, please therefore check the published record when citing. For more information contact [email protected] Re-engaging the Body and Gesture in Musical Live Coding Spencer Salazar Jack Armitage Herb Alpert School of Music Augmented Instruments California Institute of the Arts Laboratory [email protected] Centre for Digital Music Queen Mary University of London [email protected] ABSTRACT typically a set of text buffers|is most often conducted us- At first glance, the practice of musical live coding seems dis- ing a keyboard and mouse, affording limited capabilities for tanced from the gestures and sense of embodiment common musical gesture. Of critical import to this workshop is to in musical performance, electronic or otherwise. This work- consider how gesture and embodiment figure into the pro- shop seeks to explore the extent to which this assertion is cess of programming itself in live coding performance. justified, to re-examine notions of gesture and embodiment Secondly, this workshop seeks to re-examine existing defi- in musical live coding performance, to consider historical nitions and conceptions of musical gesture and embodiment approaches for integrating musical programming and ges- with specific attention to musical live coding performance. ture, and to look to the future for new ways of fusing the Literature on gesture in electronic music is often focused on two. The workshop will consist firstly of a critical discussion digital musical instruments. Is live coding readily viewed of these issues and related literature. This will be followed through this lens, or are additional considerations neces- by applied practical experiments involving ideas generated sary? Similarly, the literature surrounding live coding dis- during these discussions. The workshop will conclude with cusses many individual instances of gesture and embodi- a recapitulation and examination of these experiments in ment in relation to live coding, but to date lacks a general the context of previous research and proposed future direc- treatment of these concerns. tions. Considering historical approaches, participants will dis- cuss and propose new methods for expanding the role of ges- ture in live coding music, or extensions to existing systems Author Keywords for doing so. A lab session will be devoted to rapidly pro- Live coding, gesture, embodiment, musical instruments totyping these ideas. Finally, participants will present their prototypes alongside their underlying motiviations and dis- CCS Concepts cuss future directions for live coding research and practice. •Applied computing ! Sound and music computing; Performing arts; •Human-centered computing ! User 2. BACKGROUND interface design; As surveyed in [13], evidence of tension between live cod- ing and gesture can be seen across the literature related to 1. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION the former, given many efforts to complement live coding with more typically embodied creative practices. Collins The success of the live coding movement has drawn at- describes a number of instances of \bodily explicit live cod- tention to an apparent tension between electronic music ing," including his own explorations of live coding and dance performance, performative embodiment, and musical ges- and live coding of an acoustic improvisation ensemble [3]. ture. Computer programming, conventionally carried out Stowell and McLean state that \[a] live coder, like any im- in comfortable and relatively isolated environs, may seem provising performer, is under pressure to do something in- a strange activity to perform on stage in a musical perfor- teresting in the moment," and that a programmer's use of mance. Furthermore, the gestures and physical activities abstraction and scheduling \can lead to a lack of immedi- present in many forms of musical performance are typically acy in how the performer's actions relate to the music" [16]. absent from live coding performance, or, at least, are not These concerns motivated their commingling of live cod- requisite to the actual production of music. ing with \open gesture-based expression," including collab- This workshop seeks to probe this apparent tension, firstly orations with vocalists, thrash guitarists, drummers, banjo questioning whether it really exists at all. Many efforts players, and beatboxing. Baalman notes \the physical in- evident in the literature and in practice have connected teraction of our body [...] with the machine" as the pri- live coding to more clearly embodied creative practices, mary instance of embodiment in live coding, in addition such as performance of gestural electronic musical instru- to the development of muscle memory of commonly-typed ments, acoustic instrumental performance, dance, and pup- programming language syntaxes [2]. Magnusson describes a petry. However, interaction with the coding medium itself| live coder as \primarily a composer, writing a score for the computer to perform" [10], distancing the gestures of typing musical code from the actual production of sound. Much as been written regarding the relationship of ges- ture, embodiment, and electronic music [12, 5], though little Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution if any specific treatment of live coding is offered in the litera- 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). Copyright ture. A survey of definitions of musical gesture by Jensenius remains with the author(s). et al. broadly defines gesture as a \bridge between move- NIME’18, June 3-6, 2018, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. ment and meaning" [7]. At least one notion of gesture in 386 a computing system rejects the activities associated with Graphical programming languages for music, such as Max, typing on a keyboard [9], though most seem to admit any Pure Data, or Reaktor, are well known in the electronic physical action linked to a musical result. music community, though find comparatively little use in live coding circles. Field, Processing's \Tweak Mode," and 3. QUESTIONS AND CHALLENGES Codea are text-based programming systems that addition- This workshop aims to confront a number of questions and ally enable gestural manipulation of syntax elements di- challenges in existing thought and practical efforts surround- rectly inline with text code. In Auraglyph, developed by ing live coding and gesture, detailed in this section. The the first author, coding structures are sketched rather than workshop will approach these issues both through discus- typed, and further manipulated by touch gestures [14]. These sion and through prototyping of practical systems. systems begin to resonate with Victor's principle of enhanc- ing the connection of a programmer with the program they 3.1 Algorithm and Gesture have created; an ultimate consequence of this principle is Typically, any musical action effected in a live coding per- the dispensing of the traditional write-compile-run cycle formance must be formulated as a series of instructions for in exchange for a more immediate and reactive comput- the computer to enact that action, i.e. an algorithm. Con- ing medium [18]. Fusing these ideas with the concepts of sider a musical action such as fading down the volume of dynamic [8] and tangible [6] media, Victor's Dynamicland a sound source. To code this, a programmer must decide realizes computing processes in the form of physical objects that are digitally tracked and projected onto as an individ- if they want a linear or exponential fade out or something 1 else entirely, and how long in duration the fade out should ual interacts with them in the real world. span. In some cases, the mathematical formula for the type Other researchers have employed very different approaches of fade out over the specified duration must be encoded into to the apparent gestural limitations of text programming. an algorithm, if such an algorithm is not built in to e.g. a The Stenophone, developed by the second author, is a chorded system library of the language. This analytical approach keyboard with gestural control of its individual keys, used affords a great deal of flexibility in specifying the exact pa- as an interface for musical live coding [1]. The CodeKlavier rameters and timing of the fade out, although this precision uses a musical keyboard as an interface for both direct may not be necessary or even desirable in the context of a sound production and entry of textual code into a live cod- musical performance. This process transpires entirely be- ing environment [17]. The aforementioned systems are pre- fore any of the resulting sound has actually been effected, sented here as considerations for further discussion within and, once initiated, a musical action encoded in this way the workshop. might not be easily canceled or modified. Overall, for some 3.3 Thinking Outside the Laptop musical actions, the advantages of devising an expressive algorithm many not justify the effort required, especially Other approaches to thinking about embodiment and live in a performance scenario. Furthermore, the length of this coding have sought intersections between live coding and feedback cycle|formation of a musical idea, devising the other, more typically embodied creative practices. Collins corresponding algorithm, evaluating the computer's result, provides antecedents such as the rule-based systems of John and repeat|may impede the exploration of diverse musical Cage and Merce Cunningham in dance practice, Jo~ao Fi- ideas, an integral component of many creative practices [11]. adeiro's employment of real-time composition, and Michael If in this example the sound source's volume is mapped to Klien and Nick Mortimore's live direction of dancers via a typical gestural control such as a fader or knob, the process a software interface [3]. Collins' own work includes a col- is somewhat different.