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.