Panel Statement
Panel: Chasing Ghosts: Reactive Notation and Extreme Sight Reading
My contribution to the panel will be to present live coding as a new path in the evolution of the musical score. I will argue that live coding practice accentuates the score, and whilst being the perfect vehicle for the performance of algorithmic music, it also transforms the compositional process itself into a live event. A continuation of 20th century artistic developments of the musical score, live coding systems often embrace graphical elements and language syntaxes foreign to standard programming languages. I will show how live coding as a highly technologized artistic practice, is at its core, still a scoring practice, and one that is able to shed light on how non-linearity, play and generativity will become prominent in future creative media productions. I might demonstrate some live coding systems and show videos of key performers at play.
- Thor Magnusson is a musician/writer/programmer working in the fields of music and generative art. He is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art and Media at the University of Brighton and teaches courses on computer music and algorithmic and interactive systems. He is a co-founder of the ixi audio collective.