Live-coding research statement
← Live-coding gigs
This is the formal research statement for my live-coding body of work, and the
description attached to the collection's DOI. For the warm tour through the gigs
themselves, head back to the main page.
Research background. Live coding is a performance practice: the performer
writes and edits code on stage, in real time, as the act of making music, with
the screen projected for the audience to read. It is transdisciplinary by
nature, sitting where live musical performance meets serious systems-level
software engineering, a single set demanding both improvisational musicianship
and the writing of correct, working code in real time. The practice grew out of
the TOPLAP and algorave movements through the 2000s. It raises research
questions about how a programming language can serve as a real-time musical
instrument, and how the relationship between performer, code and audience shifts
once the code becomes visible and mutable. Bound up with both is the question of
how liveness and the ever-present risk of on-stage failure shape the performance
itself.
Research contribution. This is a sustained body of from-scratch live-coded
performance, principally my own: each set begins from a blank screen, with no
prepared material, the music built and rebuilt in code in front of the audience.
The work treats three modes usually held apart, those of performer, researcher
and engineer, as a single discipline. The performances are realised in
environments designed by Andrew Sorensen: Impromptu in the early years, and
Extempore since 2011, a project of which I am a core team member and, since
2025, primary maintainer. Extempore itself sits alongside this work rather than
within it. Because I help build the instrument rather than treat it as a sealed
tool, performance and tool-making feed each other directly. Within the body of
work, two threads recur. One is audience participation, as in the ACMC’09 set
that handed live control of program parameters to audience members’ phones. The
other is an audiovisual-duo model, pairing live-coded sound with live-coded or
hand-drawn visuals.
Research significance. The significance of the work lies in its sustained
peer-selection: across almost two decades, from 2008 to 2026 and continuing, it
has been chosen and curated for the premier venues of the field. It has been
programmed at the International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC), the field’s
flagship international gathering, in Limerick (2020) and at Shanghai Concert
Hall (2024). It has also featured at the International Symposium on Electronic
Art (ISEA, 2013), and repeatedly at the Australasian Computer Music Conference
(ACMC) between 2009 and 2022, the premier regional forum. Several of the
performances are documented in peer-reviewed proceedings. The work has been made
both with leading figures in the field and in collaboration with emerging
artists, reaching audiences in Australia, Ireland, China and New Zealand.
Cite the body of work: 10.5281/zenodo.20743614 · Zenodo community
Anchor performances
Seven performances anchor the body of work, selected for the field's premier
international (ICLC, ISEA) and regional (ACMC) venues. Each note records the
venue's standing, the basis on which the set was chosen, what made it
distinctive, and how it is documented.
Held at QUT in 2009, this is the earliest performance gathered here, made in Impromptu before the move to Extempore. It reached the stage through the juried programme of the Australasian Computer Music Conference, the region's premier forum for computer music. What marks the set is a companion iPhone app that handed live control of program parameters to audience members' phones, an early turn of the audience-participation thread that recurs across the work. No video survived, though an accompanying peer-reviewed paper, Distributed Performance in Livecoding, documents it in the conference proceedings.
The International Symposium on Electronic Art ranks among the world's longest-running gatherings for electronic and digital art; its 2013 edition came to Sydney, where the work appeared in the juried Musical Metacreation (MuMe) algorave. The set was a duo with Andrew Sorensen, designer of both Impromptu and Extempore, the environments this work is performed in, a rare on-stage pairing of the instrument's maker with one of its long-term performers. A video recording survives.
At the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, the 2014 ACMC again selected the work for its juried concert series, a duo with Andrew Sorensen that continued the pairing of Extempore's designer with a long-term performer. No recording of this set survived.
ICLC's 2020 edition, the field's flagship conference meeting that year in Limerick, placed the work in its algorave, the live-coding movement's signature club-night format, again by peer-reviewed selection. Giovanni Muzio (kesson) supplied the visuals, his Processing and OpenGL running against my Extempore set. Only part of the live stream survives, its opening lost to a broadcast fault, though that recording and the published proceedings both document the performance.
In 2021 the ACMC programmed the work into its juried evening concert at the Australian Institute of Music, a duo with Ushini Attanayake. That collaboration with Attanayake, an emerging artist, runs through several of these performances. Recorded under Canberra's Delta-wave lockdown, with the conference pushed online, the set survives in a video those circumstances make the more valuable as documentation.
Crossing the Tasman to Massey University in Wellington, the 2022 ACMC carried the work to New Zealand, again a juried duo with Ushini Attanayake. A desk audio recording was captured and is being tracked down.
The International Conference on Live Coding is the field's flagship international gathering, and its 2024 edition placed the work on the stage of the Shanghai Concert Hall, selected through the conference's juried programme. The set paired my from-scratch Extempore music with Leon Volbers's live-coded visuals and Beverly Edwards's live drawing on the adjacent screen, an instance of the audiovisual-duo thread that recurs across the work. A full video recording, produced by the NYU Shanghai team, documents it alongside the peer-reviewed proceedings.