Editorial: Live Coding Sonic Creativities

Abstract

Live coding has evolved considerably since its emergence in the early 2000s, as presented in the seminal 2003 Organised Sound (8/3) article ‘Live Coding in Laptop Performance’ by Collins, McLean, Rohrhuber and Ward. Differentiating itself from early laptop music and other computer music, it is a performance practice that promotes the sharing of the musical process with the audience, emphasising the code itself as a form of musical notation. Live coding has been adopted into various fields of art, but as musical algorithmic thinking, it has been explored and developed by many practitioners and collectives across the world up to the present and there is a broad range of divergent practices within the field. We are therefore thrilled to present the special issue ‘Live Coding Sonic Creativities’, which is the first special issue on live coding in Organised Sound. This has been a long journey of almost two years of work. In response to the invitation by Leigh Landy and James Andean in September 2021, we decided to offer a free online workshop to interested authors and a cycle of early draft feedback for early career authors. The workshop received 38 expressions of interest from around the globe. The workshop, which was held on 30 May 2022, gave us the opportunity to form a platform for authors to discuss and develop their ideas related to the special issue. Eight of the articles published here are from authors who took part in the workshop. Overall, we think this process was helpful and inclusive to the authors because several of the authors are publishing in the OS journal for the first time. The core research question of this special issue concerns the idiosyncratic sonic creativities that emerge from the practice of live coding and what new sonic material live coding has enabled. This special issue takes the pulse of live coding applied to sonic creativity with a breadth-and-depth collection of 14 articles and a book review. In our call for submissions, we asked where live coding might be heading sonically speaking. How can live coding bring novel ways of organising sounds never experienced before? What new languages, systems and interfaces could enable new sonic and musical ideas? We think now is the opportune time to inspect live coding from a sonic arts perspective as well as a software studies and (digital) humanities perspective, looking at the past, present and especially the future of live coding. In this issue, we seek to critically analyse live coding from a sociocultural and musicological perspective, as well as enquire how digital culture and cultural heritage have been impacted by this practice. The collection of articles is genuinely diverse in terms of themes including new theories and philosophies on live coding, diversity and inclusion and contemporary sociocultural processes embodied by different communities of practice. The articles represent a breadth in musical genres, approaches to live coding, interdisciplinary practice related to sound-based creativity, innovative sound and music composition, and new paradigms and environments that enable new ways of thinking and working with sound, as well as speculative futures and new imaginaries of live coding. The first part of the issue starts with theoretical advances in live coding as well as diversity and inclusion initiatives and communities of practice. The first article, ‘Musical Live Coding in Relation to Interactivity Variations’ by Georgios Diapoulis, presents a cognitive approach to live coding by looking at pre-reflective processes in gestural interaction. This is followed by Aldo Mauricio Lara Mendoza, Laura Viviana Zapata Cortés and Emre Dündar’s ‘The Unknowing Side of the Algorithm: Decolonizing live coding from Latin America’, which discusses the practice of live coding in Latin America from a decolonising perspective. In ‘Livecoderas Latinoamericanas: Diversity, educational access, and musicking networks in live coding in Latin America’, Emma Wilde and Mario Alberto Duarte-García discuss the opportunities that live coding has offered to women live coders in Latin America. Finally, we have Patrick Hartono and Stevie J. Sutanto’s ‘Algorave Music Practice in Indonesia: Paguyuban Algorave’, a study on the creative practice of Algorave music in Indonesia. The issue continues with new approaches to live coding and interdisciplinary live coding. In ‘Live Coding Outside, Live Coding Inside: Listening, participation and walking’, Hernani VillaseñorRamírez examines live coding connected to soundscape, sound art installation and soundwalking. Mattias Petersson offers his perspective on ‘Live Coding the Global Hyperorgan: The Paragraph environment in the indeterminate place’, discussing geographically distributed hyperorgans that are performed in network music performance using live