When Literacies Collide: The Role of Translation in Music+Coding Activities

The integration of computer programming and music-making has a rich history dating back to the 1950s. While there has been substantial prior work on the creative and cognitive affordances of programming languages for engaging in musical tasks, there is less work that attempts to understand the theoretical implications of music and code as literacies in collision. In this paper, we report on a study in which five undergraduate students with experience in both music and coding completed two creative musical tasks: one using conventional instruments and tools and one using Python code in an online music-coding environment. In combining representational infrastructures from music and code, both undergo transformations. We introduce semiotic theories of translation and transcription to make sense of the music-coding process and describe strategies that participants devised in their creative process.