Hexagram-Concordia Centre for Research
Creation in Media Arts and Technologies

in collaboration with

Concordia University - Department of Music

The practice of live coding has become a consistent focus of activity for the Cybernetic Orchestra at McMaster University. Our emerging thesis is that live coding is a highly scalable practice for participatory electronic ensembles. In support of this thesis we will present a typology of the performance decisions specific to solo live coding practice (supported by our mapping of widely available live coding performance documents), then discuss the challenges involved in transferring these practices to a highly collective setting. Examples from both free improvisation and highly composed live coding pieces deployed by the Cybernetic Orchestra will be presented. Time permitting, we could even lead an audience of any size through a collective live coding performance – in our experience, the initial steps can be taken in approximately five minutes. In our concluding remarks, we’ll discuss the future directions of this research: on one hand towards a more comprehensive map of laptop orchestra compositions and practices, and on the other hand, towards the development of a live coding environment that is scalable onto mobile devices.

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