Brand Niu Video
I finally managed to put together a video of my live coding performance at Niu. Enjoy! (that is, if you have 23 minutes to kill)
2nd annual “Live Coding Sessions” evening at Niu, on March 22, 2013
Coding was done in [SuperCollider](http://supercollider.github.io) 3.6, and I set myself the constraint of only using the most basic building blocks of sound: sine waves (as oscillators, LFOs, envelopes, even as arpeggiators driving patterns of scale degrees). I also tried to create everything pretty much from scratch, although I did "cheat" a few times (cheating, perhaps, according to live coding purists). As I'm still wishing for macro functionality in SC's new IDE (if I had some time I ought to just contribute it myself), I decided to use an external macro program to speed the coding in a few cases (just a marginally sexier version of cut & paste). It's too bad you have to strain a bit to read the projected text in the video -- that's the most interesting part of live coding: seeing the code that goes along with the sounds you're hearing! Otherwise, it can be a bit long... (-;
Audio was captured on a Zoom H1 recorder, including room ambience (not to mention me pounding the keyboard). I also taped a contact mic to my laptop, giving an enhanced sense of “liveness” to the coding). The sound is probably best appreciated with headphones (for the lower sine wave frequencies).
(Spot the glitch! From about 4:10 to 5:10, I make a mistake, and have to work my way through it. In trying to pack a lot into 20 minutes, I make an error and it takes me a moment to figure out where I’ve gone wrong… I should have scrolled back to read the errors in the post window right away, but my pride was trying to avoid doing that, to make it seem as if all were under control. Live coding is an interesting mental challenge – It’s easy to code from the comfort of home or office, but your brain works differently (or doesn’t ;-)) under “live” (i.e. people watching you) conditions! It’s not unlike meditation, in that it needs extreme focus and concentration. Turns out I just needed to keep calm and carry on…and add that missing variable name!
Merci beaucoup à Anna Duriez – for bringing her SLR camera and recording the video (and letting me use it)! It was quite flickery (a strobing effect from the shutter speed interfering with the lights and projector), but I managed to even it out by blending frames together – luckily there’s not a lot of action or camera moves in live coding, so I could get away with it.