My new fave thing to go to is live coding gigs, a.k.a. algoraves.

There are special browser-based programming languages like strudel where you type code to define the beats and the sound, like mod synth in code, and it plays in a loop even while you’re coding. (The playhead moves along as a little white box.)

As you write more code and edit the code, you make the music.

So people do gigs like this: their laptop is hooked up to (a) speakers and (b) a projector. You see the code on the big screen in real-time as it is written and hear it too.

Here’s what it looks like (Instagram).

That pic is from a crypt under a church in Camberwell at an event called Low Stakes | High Spirits.

(There are more London Live Coding events. I’ve been to an AlgoRhythm night too and it was ace.)

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It helps that these beeps and boops are the kind of music I listen to anyway.

But there is something special about the performer performing right there with the audience and vibing off them.

Like all art, there’s some stuff you prefer and some not so much, and sometimes you’ll get some music that is really, really what you’re into and it just builds and builds until you’re totally transported.

So you take a vid or a pic of what’s going on, wanting to capture the moment forever, and what you see when you’re going back through your photo library the next day is endless pics of a bunch of code projected on the wall and you’re like, what is this??

You have to be there.

(I suppose though it also means you can try out some of the code for yourself? View Source but for live music?)

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Actually that’s art isn’t it.

All art galleries are a bit weird eh. Each time you visit, there are a hundred paintings scattered in rooms and you walk through like uh-huh, uh-huh, ok, that’s nice, uh-huh, ok. Then at random one of them skewers you through your soul and you’re transfixed by the image for life.

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Often what happens is the musician is not alone!

There is also live coding software for visuals e.g. hydra. (hydra is browser-based too so you can try it right now.)

So the person live coding visuals sits right next to the person live coding music, with the music and the visuals projected side-by-side on adjacent big screens. Code overlaid on both.

The visuals don’t necessarily automatically correspond to the music. There may be no microphone involved.

The visuals person and the music person are jamming together but really not off each other directly; both are doing their thing but steering in part by the audience, which itself is responding to the music and visuals together.

So you get this strange loop of vibes and it’s wonderful.

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I hadn’t expected to see comments in code.

At the last night I went to, the musician was writing comments in the code, i.e. lines of code that start with // so they are not executed but just there.

The comments like the rest of the code are projected.

There were comments like (not verbatim because this is from memory):

// i’ll make it faster. is this good?

And:

// my face is so red rn this is my first time

So there’s this explicit textual back-channel to the audience that people can read and respond to, separately to the music itself.

And I love the duality there, the two voices of the artist.

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You get something similar at academic conferences?

I feel like I must have mentioned this before but I can’t find it.

One of my great joys is going to academic conferences and hearing people present work which is at the far reaches of my understanding. Either sciences/soft sciences or humanities, it’s all good.

My favourite trope is when the researcher self-glosses.

So they read out their paper or their written lecture, and that’s one voice with a certain tone and authority and cadence.

Then every couple of paras they shift their weight on their feet, maybe tilt their head, then add an extended thought or a side note, and their voice becomes brighter and more conversational, just for the duration of that sidebar.

Then they drop back into the regular tone and resume their notes.

Transcribed, a talk like this would read like a single regular essay.

But in person you’re listening to the speaker in dialogue with themselves and it’s remarkable, I love it, it adds a whole extra dimension of meaning.

If you’re an academic then you’ll know exactly what I mean. I’ve noticed these two voices frequently although culture/media studies is where I spot it most.

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In Samuel Delaney’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Amazon) - one of my favourite books of all time - there is a species called evelmi and they have many tongues.

I swear there is a scene in which an evelm speaks different words with different tongues simultaneously.

(I can’t find it for you as I only have the paperback and it’s been a while since my last re-read.)

But there’s a precision here, right? To chord words, to triangulate something otherwise unreachable in semantic space or to make a self-contradicting statement, either playfully or to add depth and intention.

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Anyway so I love all these dualities at these live coding nights: the music and visuals, the code and the comments, the genotype which I read and the phenotype which I hear

It’s an incredibly welcoming scene here in London – lots of young people of course who doing things that are minimum 10x cooler than anything I did at that age, and older people too, everyone together.

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You know:

Last week the local pub had a band singing medieval carols and suddenly I got that adrift in time, atemporal feeling of knowing that I’m in the company of listeners who have been hearing these same songs for hundreds of years, an audience that is six hundred years deep.

(There was also a harp. Gotta love a harp.)

I never think of myself as a live music person but give me some folk or choral or modern classical or opera and I’m lost in it.

Or, well, electronica, but that’s more about the dancing.

Or the time that dude had a 3D printed replica of a Neanderthal bone flute, the oldest known musical instrument from 50,000 years ago if I remember it right, and he improv’d ancient music led by the sound of the instrument itself as we drove through the Norwegian fjords and holy shit that was a transcendent moment that I will remember forever.