1. INTRODUCTION
In this article, I reflect on the combination of live coding with soundscape, soundart installation and soundwalking – sound practices in which the sound environment and space play a relevant role. To show this, the text presents four cases, including mine, that explore such combinations as the performances Live from Ecclesall Woods by Lucy Cheesman and Bodies of Water – Fieldcoding Exercises for Code by Niklas Reppel, the sound installation Creative Intervention 3 – Live Coding with Mexico City Sounds by Aide Violeta Fuentes-Barron, and the soundwalking project Portable Soundwalking Live Coding System (PSLCS) by Hernani Villaseñor. The examples occur outside the stage or private space where live coding usually takes place. I present each performance and soundwork as a separate case. For that, I introduce each of them with information that identifies, classifies, organises and catalogues the performances and the works.
To understand how these live coders and artists approached their combined live coding sound practices, I reviewed videos of their performances, installations and walks on web platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo. Likewise, I designed a written semi-structured questionnaire of 10 questions from an artistic research perspective to suit each artwork and practice. To design the questionnaire, I followed the methodology proposed by Rubén López-Cano and Ursula San Cristóbal Opazo (Reference López-Cano and San Cristóbal Opazo2014) on interviewing artists in the context of artistic research. They propose the interview as a method of artistic research alongside other qualitative research methods such as observation, live histories, focal groups and autoethnography. Regarding the interview, López-Cano and San Cristóbal Opazo say this ‘is a face-to-face verbal interaction consisting of questions and answers oriented to a specific topic or objectives’ (ibid.: 115). Also, they mention that a semi-structured interview presents guidelines that could change, which is the case with the questionnaire I designed.
I decided to conduct an interview because I was interested in the reasons these artists chose to play outside, the motivation to make a sound installation and the techniques they used to record the sounds. I asked them, among other things, about the decision to play outside, how they chose the place and the kind of sounds they captured during their performances, walkings and sound installation. Furthermore, I asked about listening to the soundscape when they perform and the difficulties to live coding in situations other than the typical performance configuration.
As I read the answers, I realised that the relationship with the sound was more complex than the one with a recording technique or the decision to record a specific sound. This relationship involves, as well, listening, choosing the place to play, and the audience. In addition, positions, ideas, intentions and curiosity about sound, places and audience interaction came from each interview.
A common thing in all cases, even though one occurs inside a gallery, is walking as a methodology to carry out their work. Sometimes walking is a method to choose the place to play; in others is a step of the process of the whole installation or a way to get sounds from the city. As a methodology in art and music, Elena Biserna (Reference Biserna2022) describes walking as practice artists from different disciplines have been doing since the 1960s. She proposes that walking has expanded different art disciplines, including non-artistic practices focusing on the situation. This has pushed art to leave institutions and art spaces to act in the public sphere. In the case of live coding, walking reconfigures it as an expanded practice that looks for different spaces other than the typically established venues such as concert halls, experimental music clubs, or pubs.
The presented cases in this article use a computational medium. In this way, they introduce, through live coding, algorithmic thinking to sound practices that are generally concerned with environmental sound, space and listening. The examples do not show direct sound takes but mediation of the soundscape through an algorithmic process within a loop, a pattern, or a computational routine written or modified on-the-fly by the live coder. This idea is apparent in Aide Fuentes-Barron’s (Reference Fuentes-Barron2021) explanation of how she uses ixi lang, a live coding language developed by Thor Magnusson (Reference Magnusson2009), to form a score with which people can interact with her digital art installation to construct an urban soundscape.
The idea of live coding outside, or live coding with field recordings, does not occur for the first time with these works. Some live coders have been doing live coding in places other than the stage or the studio, and also recording sounds in nature to use later in live coding performances. For example, a group of live coders led by Alex McLean (Reference McLean2017) during the TidalCycles summerschool, Alexandra Cárdenas (Reference Cárdenas2019) with her work Street Code, or the duo codepage, consisting of Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen and Malte Steiner, with the performance Surface Tension II (elektronengehirn, 2019).
The first example, as McLean (Reference McLean2017) describes, is a performance in a natural environment during a field trip to a Peak District park organised in the context of the TidalCycles summerschool. McLean (Reference McLean2017) announced in the workshop advertisement that a group of battery-powered group would go outside to improvise, as can be seen later in a short video of the excursion. Footnote 1 In the second example, Cárdenas (Reference Cárdenas2019) proposes exploring urban public spaces to perform live coding. This composer and live coder comments that she has performed ‘live coded electroacoustic music’ (ibid.: 115) in public spaces in Berlin in 2017 to play in different places as the established venues. For their side, the codepage duo, have presented their live coding piece during the International Conference On Live Coding 2019 in Madrid. The duo used in their performance sounds ‘of water coming from research trips to Iceland, Finland and Denmark’ (elektronengehirn, 2019).
These examples show previous approaches to performing live coding in a natural open space, the urban environment of a subway station, or with water sounds of different environments. Unlike the cases of this article, the previous examples do not record the sound in situ for live coding, and it is unclear if they use soundwalking to produce the soundworks and performances.
In contrast, what characterises the cases of this text is that the live coders record sound from, and at, the site of the live coding in situ. In the performances of Lucy Cheesman and Niklas Reppel, this occurs at the moment of their live coding performances. While in the installation of Aide and the soundwalk of Hernani, the sound recording occurs beforehand during a deliberate walking methodology. In all cases, the performance motif has to do with the sound of the place. This entails listening, recording and live coding with the sounds of a creek, a stream, the wind, city traffic, or the loudspeakers of vendors. Also, the sound produced in situ by the live coders include sounds of the voice, a musical instrument, or footsteps on dry leaves.
That does not mean the first examples and those presented in this article are not connected. The action of going out and making live coding in a public and natural space is common; furthermore, the concept of field recording, instead of sampling, brings sound into a live coding performance.
In this regard, recording sound in a specific place introduces problems to live coding that has been studied in other fields, such as opening a microphone in a public space and mediating the soundscape through the processes of a computational environment.
The first problem has been studied by Maja Zećo (Reference Zećo2021), who argues that recording the sound of a public environment with a microphone has implications. From Zećo’s perspective, soundwalking and field recording, when performed in a public space, link the listener and the place in a sociopolitical relationship. For the author, the place is a sociopolitical site where listening encounters complex factors formed by objects and beings emitting vibrations and sounds. Since this action produces knowledge through the place’s sound environment, the author invites us to recognise the complexity of the place we record and the biases our listening produces.
The second problem resonates with the idea of algorithmic listening suggested by Miguel Carvalhais and Rosemary Lee (Reference Carvalhais and Lee2019). These authors propose the emergence of hybrid media where physical and virtual spaces coexist in which soundwalking and soundscape move and amalgamate with computational environments. The idea of these authors is based on the mediation of space that computation makes, from which they propose different forms of hybrid environments. This idea contrasts with the space, or acoustic environment, analysed by Jian Kang and Brigitte Schulte-Fortkamp, who describe it as ‘the sound from all sources that could be heard by someone in that place’ (Kang and Schulte-Fortkamp Reference Kang and Schulte-Fortkamp2016: 2). However, they propose that this sound is not mediated by other environments or devices such as headphones.
In this sense, the examples in this article present hybrid soundscapes that move away from the idea of the acoustic environment as they are constructed with algorithmic processing in the computational realm. This exposes a double soundscape: that of the acoustic environment where the performance takes place and that of the hybrid soundscape that lives inside the computer, sounds through speakers, and is transmitted on the web.
Thus, in the following sections, I argue about the combination of live coding with different sound practices and the problems they face beyond the discussions about programming languages, source code and algorithms. This reconfigures the artistic practice of live coding and deals with problems relating to space, sound, listening and open microphones in public spaces, and with exploring different scenarios for live coding.
2. SOUNDSCAPE AND LIVE CODING
Live coding and soundscape are unrelated sound practices since, as observed in the literature reviewed, their communities and objectives are barely connected. Live coding is mainly related to improvisation (Rohrhuber and de Campo, Reference Rohrhuber, De Campo, Assayag and Gerzso2006) and soundscape to composition (Westerkamp Reference Westerkamp2002; Truax Reference Truax2008; Brona Reference Brona2018). Although several live coders record sounds from their acoustic environments for live coding, very little has been discussed about this relationship, and almost nothing when this happens in situ.
Recently Lucy Cheesman and Niklas Reppel each performed live coding sound in natural environments outside the typical live coding stage or personal studio. In these performances, both live coders included recorded sounds from the natural environment where they performed, which they captured and modified at their performances. In addition to improvising with the sounds of the environment, they produced and recorded sound from the voice, body or musical instruments.
Each of their performances was streamed over the internet as part of different events organised by the international live coding community. The performances occurred during the pandemic, leading to streaming concerts and festivals online. Taking advantage of the live coding community’s experience in streaming events online, the activities organised by different local communities multiplied during this time, establishing a virtual stage that, in some cases, no longer replicated the typical screen projection of live concerts. As a result of this event, the decision to go outside to live coding proposes a double change of perspective: one that moves from the studio to a natural environment and the other that goes from live performance to online broadcast.
2.1. Heavy lifting: live coding outside
Performance: Live from Ecclesall Woods (https://youtu.be/yqOR7ULUQEE)
Artist: Heavy Lifting (Lucy Cheesman)
Venue: TidalCycles Solstice Marathon
Date: 20 December 2020.
In the interview, Lucy says that the idea for her performance came from the need to go outside and do something different during the pandemic. Over that period, playing indoors in her city was impossible, and she began perceiving the online concerts she was participating in and watching as boring due to the absence of an audience and the lack of external sound. From that situation, Lucy organised with other live coders to explore the option of playing outside. The idea came while attending walks with a Sheffield group of artists and tech people with whom she discussed the possibility of performing outside. However, they faced bad weather and technical complications, but the live coding performance took place during the TidalCycles Solstice Marathon.
The video of her performance starts with the computer screen showing code written with TidalCycles – a library of patterns to sequence music with code written by Alex McLean (McLean et al. Reference McLean2009) – two cameras at the bottom of the transmission window, and a phrase that reads ‘heavy lifting live from ecclesall woods’ (Figure 1). The camera on the left, labelled ‘glitchy woods cam’ shows a division of several frames in which the colour blue predominates, while the camera on the right side, labelled ‘lucy cam’ shows Lucy coding in the foreground. She is in front of a tree, it is night; she is wearing headphones and has a small flashlight on her forehead.
Lucy Cheesman performs Live from Ecclesall Woods in Solstice Marathon, 20 December 2020. Still from Lucy Cheesman YouTube Channel. With permission of the artist.
The presentation begins with sounds in a loop that seems to be a voice and a percussive object. In the background, there is a soundscape of the place where a stream prevails. Lucy starts her performance with a prepared code and writes some lines on the fly. At some point, she stops writing and reads a text of poetry or some botanical details. A few seconds later, some words in the loop are heard from the text she has just read, which are mixed with the sounds of the river in a loop. Lucy explains that she placed a microphone to capture ambient sounds and used a TidalCycles looper to sequence them. She expressed a desire to work with live sounds in TidalCycles for a long time since she had previously tried with a MIDI looper facing synchronisation problems. The looper was running during the performance, allowing her to record long sounds into eight buffers. That represented the challenge of integrating the ambient sounds recorded in situ with the samples. She states that working with long live sounds brings an element of surprise to the performance.
At some point, she rubs her hands together and starts whistling to make bird calls that are heard later in a loop. The previously recorded samples are mixed in along with the newly recorded sounds. The rhythm she generates with the samples remains constant during the presentation, while the performance variations occur with the sound she records. At the end of the performance, Lucy begins to mute the samples in patterns and leaves what seems to be the sounds recorded at the moment. At the end remains the sound of wind and water in a rhythmic loop with the sound of the stream and some footsteps in the background. The performance ends with a few seconds of silence.
2.2. Niklas Reppel: fieldcoding to improvise music
Performance: Bodies of Water – Fieldcoding Exercises for Code (https://youtu.be/SPzrDyASXTg?t=1870)
Artist: Niklas Reppel
Venue: International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC) 2021 in Valdivia, Chile
Date: 17 December 2021
In his interview, Niklas says that he decided to do this performance because of the attraction of making music outdoors. He comments on the idea of the extension of listening through a microphone and on the mix that arises from combining the soundscape of the place with the sound processed at the moment. For Niklas, this activity has a sociological dimension. He questions the discourse of the confrontation of the human against the machine and is aware of the extensions that technology offers him. This activity allows him to listen more consciously to the soundscape from a different perspective to share it.
The performance video starts with a blank screen of the Mégra (Reppel Reference Reppel2016) domain-specific programming language editor for live coding, developed by Niklas himself. At the bottom right is a window showing him with his headphones in the foreground (Figure 2). It is daytime, and he is in front of some trees. Further down on the left side of the screen is a phrase indicating his name and where he is located (Muttenbach creek, Witten, Germany). Niklas used a lavalier microphone between him and the creek to capture the ambient sound and used some sound samples that he froze on the fly.
Niklas Reppel performs Bodies of Water – Fieldcoding Exercises for Code, 17 December 2021. Still from the ToplapValdivia YouTube Channel. With permission of the organisation of ICLC ZAL 2021.
In the video, the soundscape begins to play with a predominant creek sound. Niklas writes two lines of code, turns up the volume, cuts the sound into pieces, adds reverb and creates a rhythm. At some point, he turns the camera to show us the landscape of the place. He returns the camera to the original shot and suddenly starts playing a chord with a harmonica. He stops playing his harmonica and writes two more lines of code that raise the rate of the harmonica recording and creates harmony. During the presentation, Niklas alternates his actions between writing, copying, modifying code and playing the harmonica. One of the lines of code has the function of recording the sound coming through the lavalier microphone. He adds filters and more reverb to the sounds and continues to create a large harmonica soundscape to add several layers of long loops. Unlike conventional live coding, there are no patterns but a harmonic sound flow with the sound base of the first soundscape. To finish, he does a frequency fade and keeps the initial creek loop, erases the code little by little, sets the clear instruction and says goodbye with his hand on the camera.
The idea of this performance arises under the notion of Fieldcoding, which Niklas describes as follows:
In the end the computer is an extension of ourselves, so bringing it to nature isn’t an attempt to ‘technologize’ nature, but just bringing our extended eyes, ears and mind with us, even if it can be a logistical challenge. So in the end it’s not an attempt to bring technology to nature, but to bring ourselves, we who are cyborgs (in the Andy Clark (Reference Clark2003) sense). In that sense it’s not even an attempt at ‘reconciliation’ of nature and technology, if we don’t accept the split between us, nature, and technology. Technology is (or can/should be) an extension of ourselves, and we are part of nature, anyway. (Personal communication from Niklas Reppel Reference Reppel2022)
2.3. Creek, stream and microphones
Although these performances are unrelated, both have similarities, such as the selected locations, the climate, and the broadcast strategies. On the other hand, they present differences, such as the programming language used and the aesthetics of the resulting music.
The cases of Lucy and Niklas are similar because they start from the same principle: open a microphone in a natural environment to capture sound and process it algorithmically alongside some audio filters. However, their performances cover more than just technical aspects. In the presentations, both live coders add external sounds to the soundscape, such as the texts read by Lucy or the harmonica played by Niklas. Besides the sounds produced by them, the ambient sound of the place that enters through their microphone is added. It is interesting that, in both cases, the reference of the soundscape is water in movement. In this sense, Lucy comments that she took as a reference the sound of water running from a stream in Ecclesall Woods, while Niklas expresses that a creek was the reference to choosing the place from where he played.
I asked both of them if people passing by the place realised that they were playing music, and both answered that apparently not. This answer is interesting because although Lucy and Niklas use headphones during their performances and the sound is received from a distance in the audience’s computers connected to the event, both produce sound within the environment and become part of the soundscape that is not transmitted by the computer. Here, two soundscapes are formed: the algorithmic soundscape of network transmission and the soundscape of the place. In one, the live coders and the interconnected audience participate; in the other, the live coders, the people and the objects in each place produce the soundscape.
3. SOUND INSTALLATION AND LIVE CODING
Live coding, as a multidisciplinary digital art practice, is easily coupled to the game of disciplinary crossings of the art installation. In the wide variety of art installations, the sound installation has the particularity of incorporating the aural dimension. Ros Bandt (Reference Bandt2006) proposes that the sound installation interweaves sound and visual art in time and space to offer experiences to the participating listener. For Bandt, a sound installation is an art form that narrows the boundaries between different artistic practices where sound, space and time converge to challenge listening through hearing, eye and touch. This can be seen in the installation of Aide Violeta Fuentes-Barron, who intervenes in a gallery with visual, aural and haptic media, including live coding.
3.1. Aide Violeta Fuentes-Barron: live coding the city sounds
Artist: Aide Violeta Fuentes-Barron
Installation: Creative Intervention 3 – Live coding with Mexico City sounds (https://vimeo.com/464822757)
Venue: Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, University of Sussex
Date: 6–9 January 2020
Creative Intervention 3 – Live coding with Mexico City sounds is part of Creative Interventions in Digital Borders: a digital art installation. Aide used various software and digital resources in this project, including the live coding language ixi lang. In particular, Creative Intervention 3 proposes co-creating an urban soundscape built from live coding with the audience’s participation. To this end, participants are provided with a selection of seven sounds of Mexico City (recorded and collected by Aide) used for selling food and services announced with loudspeakers. The installation provides the audience with a laptop that projects the code prepared in ixi lang on a screen and the instructions for live coding with the sounds.
Aide uses sound and live coding as one of many elements of the installation. She explains that the main idea is to ‘emulate a geographical space in a digital one’ (Aide’s personal communication in interview 2022). The urban soundscape, taken from the physical to the digital, has sound as an element that allows us to recognise activities happening in the city’s streets. With this, the installation explores the sound identity of a city through its sounds.
Something the author comments on is that in her projects, she likes to explore the software in a different way than it was originally developed for; likewise, the installation format allowed her to work with sound as a medium she was not used to. This form of exploration confers a different relationship with technology, an idea Carolina Di Próspero (Reference Di Próspero2015) finds well founded in live coding. In this respect, Di Próspero refers to the idea that live coders have on programming an instrument at the same time of its execution in an exploratory and improvised way. She says that ‘there is a difference of intention that has to do with exploring rather than executing, creating rather than reproducing, experiencing the process rather than achieving the finished product’ (ibid.: 47).
The video documentation of the installation shows the four creative interventions. The video starts with a movement from left to right where the following elements are shown: a screen projecting the Zocalo of Mexico City, two screens contrasting streets from different areas of the city, the screen with the ixi lang code, and finally, a screen with multiple images from the internet. The video scenes describe each of the interventions. The third one corresponds to the creative intervention with live coding. This scene shows a large screen projecting the ixi lang code and the instructions to modify it next to a laptop on a table (Figure 3). Aide explains to the audience what the projected code represents. Someone sits down, puts on headphones and begins to intervene in the code. Suddenly one of the city’s best-known food vending sounds is heard along with some superimposed rhythmic flutes.
Aide Violeta Fuentes Barron Creative Intervention 3 – Live Coding with Mexico City Sounds, 6–9 January 2020. Still from Aide Violeta Fuentes B Vimeo channel. With permission of the artist.
In this intervention, Aide uses live coding as a method to build soundscapes and as a strategy to interact with the audience under the idea of co-creation. In a brief explanation, she encourages the audience to perform live coding even if it is the first time they face programming. The action of coding and projecting the code confers the participant in the role of the live coder in a kind of representation of a live coding performance within the format of an art installation. The participant interacts in a scenario that resembles the live coding performance situation, projecting the code as it sounds.
3.2. The attraction of city sounds
Art installations challenge politically the space and the art forms that are closely linked to the place. Although the final presentation of an art installation is often in a gallery or museum, the intervention of a sound installation in public space enables a form of political activism that has been relegated in live coding.
Despite this, the art installation has had greater exposure within the live coding community since, according to Ros Bandt (Reference Bandt2006), installation is an artistic practice characterised by its disciplinary crossings. We can observe that the third and fourth editions of the International Conference on Live Coding have presented art installations of live coders, such as Jaime Lobato, Alejandro Franco + Tomas Sánchez + Diego Villaseñor, Jessica Rodríguez, Joana Chicau + Jonathan Reus, and Feli Cabrera López. Also, other exhibition spaces in Mexico and Canada have presented sound installations with live coding by Alexandra Cárdenas + David Ogborn.
What is remarkable is that many of the live coders who have explored sound installation within live coding come from Latin America. This is consistent with the regional artists’ attraction to sound installation in public spaces, a phenomenon studied by Mario Duarte-García and Emma Wilde. These authors argue that the festivity expressed in the daily life of Latin American countries is reflected in several cultural activities in their streets. This generates, they say, ‘complex sonic fingerprints’ (Duarte-García and Wilde Reference Duarte-García and Wilde2021: 110), which have a particularity derived from the contrast. The authors propose that such characteristics motivate artists to create sound installations in public spaces where they establish a relationship with sound and social and political space.
In this regard, Aide shows a sound relationship with her Mexican cultural context. She brings familiar sounds to the inhabitants of Mexico City into a live coding situation created within her sound installation. This exposes the audience to a series of sounds from another culture to establish a composition with a notation system through a programming live coding language.
4. SOUNDWALKING AND LIVE CODING
Soundwalking combined with live coding is complicated because it is hard to change a program while it runs when the live coder walks. Currently, this hybrid practice is in a testing stage where some live coders, such as myself and Niklas Reppel (Reference Reppel2022), perform walks with their computers to do live coding in the moment or afterward. However, soundwalking with a computational or digital device can be seen in artworks that focus on listening and the problem of the body moving in public spaces. We can observe this in the works of artists from communities other than live coding, such as Flâneuse>La caminata by Amanda Gutiérrez (Reference Gutiérrez2014) or Ambulation by Tim Shaw (Reference Shaw2014). In the first case, Gutiérrez walks with a ‘360-degree camera to document soundwalks of female participants in the public space’ (Gutiérrez Reference Gutiérrez2014); in the second case, Shaw walks with a computational device to transmit sounds recorded during the walk to the audience who wear wireless headphones as he explains.
On the other hand, what live coding has to reconcile is the action of walking, listening, and typing. One option is to perform the walk to collect sound and data and, at some point, start coding with this material in a post-walk manner. That is to say, first walk and record sounds during the path and then arrive at a place to do live coding with the recorded sounds. This is what the project Portable Soundwalking Live Coding System is all about. Other attempts could be to do live coding while walking or to live code the path of the walking instead of the sound.
4.1. Hernani Villaseñor: live coding a soundwalking
Artist: Hernani Villaseñor
Project: Portable Soundwalking Live Coding System (PSLCS) (https://youtu.be/-KMVe8xC8r8)
Venue: Mexico City streets
Date: 22 November 2021
The idea of PSLCS arose at the juncture of two circumstances: the end of artistic research that resulted in a series of computational objects for live coding with ambient sound called SonoTexto (Villaseñor-Ramírez Reference Villaseñor-Ramírez2019), a series of classes written with SuperCollider to live coding with sound recorded during a performance; and the idea of live coding outside during the pandemic. These circumstances led me, on the one hand, to try different computer technologies for sound creation and, on the other hand, to explore live coding in everyday open spaces. The use of portable devices, the possibility of going for a walk and the inspiration of various artistic projects that combine soundwalking with digital technologies were triggers to start the project.
The live coding combined with soundwalking within the PSLCS project happened with a prototype consisting of a Raspberry Pi board computer, a Raspi Audio card, and the SuperCollider SonoTexto classes. All this makes up a computational device that engages with the walker in urban soundwalking of known routes. The goal is to record sounds and do live coding afterward with them.
The soundwalks I performed in the city were guided by sound marks of the streets and avenues I walk daily. In this respect, Andra McCartney proposes that ‘a soundwalk provides an opportunity to create a route through a place focused on listening’ (McCartney Reference McCartney2010: 1). The author proposes that a soundwalk links the daily experience of walking to creative listening. The focus on listening described by McCartney takes shape during the walk when I concentrate on recognising the sounds of my urban environment. This allows me to guide my attention and direct the digital device to record sound marks of the route.
A video document of the first soundwalking performed with the PSLCS device can be seen in the video recorded and produced in Mexico City for the November 22 presentation at Hybrid Live Coding Interfaces 2021 – Exploring the World. The video shows two layers of visual information overlaid in the discontinued Atom source code editor: one of the prepared code with SuperCollider and the other of the soundwalking video played with the live coding video synth Hydra developed by Olivia Jack (Reference Jack2018) (Figure 4). The video starts with the image of the RaspberryPi connected to a laptop inside the author’s studio from where the walk starts. Above, the SuperCollider code, superimposed on the video image, begins to produce sound and be modified. A door opens and a staircase is observed, then the computational device goes out of frame for a few moments. The SuperCollider code lets us hear several loops made with the sounds recorded during the walk. The route runs along an avenue. The live coding sound is superimposed on the ambient sound captured by the camera’s microphone. The video sequence moves due to the effect of the walk; suddenly, the sound loop changes to an atmospheric one where some sounds of the environment are recognised and mixed with the captured soundscape. At some point, footsteps on dry leaves can be heard, which shows the walker’s presence in the soundscape. The route runs through avenues, streets and small spaces with trees. Suddenly, there is an encounter with a cat. After that, the author finally returns to the starting point. The sound becomes more atmospheric than the initial loop and the video ends.
Hernani Villaseñor soundwalking with PSLCS, 21th November 2021. Still from Hernani Villaseñor YouTube Channel. With permission of the artist.
In this situation, the sense of walking, listening and being aware of the source code running inside the computing device to record sound is developed. In terms of Biserna (Reference Biserna2022), walking and the attention to the technological device, as well as live coding and listening, can be seen as a ‘transversal relationship’. That is to say, live coding and walking are two activities that we usually do not associate with happening at the same time – programming while walking – even if, in this case, the computer is executing the code programmed previously. However, Biserna (Reference Biserna2022), following a historical line of artists who walk as artistic practice since the 1960s, mentions that nowadays, artists from different disciplines continue proposing ‘ambulatory performances’. Under this perspective, walking as artistic practice and live coding are not as far as they seem.
There is attentive listening to the sound result produced by the code and what happens around it. During the walk, there is no control over the sound recording, only the route I follow, because a computational routine controls the moment the computer records sound. In this case, my listening is dissociated from the listening of the computer since I do not use headphones during the walk. That is possible because I have programmed the code in advance and it is running in a computer routine. This way, the computer records the sounds at each determined time while I can focus on walking the way.
4.2. Programmatic sound records from the walk
When we talk about practices such as soundscape, walking and installation, the methodology of walking and listening is a contribution that live coding can incorporate into its realm. The walking confronts live coding with public space and takes the live coder out of its closed space. Also, going out and walking to live coding face the problem of adapting a digital device to the body. This can be observed in soundwalkings projects, other than live coding, working with digital devices, as Amanda Gutiérrez (Reference Gutiérrez2014) or Tim Shaw (Reference Shaw2014) mentioned earlier.
The work of Hernani expresses the desire to go outside and walk with a computational device, a common activity if we think of the walkers that bring their sound recorders with them. Also, his works show a common attraction to mediate the listening through microphones and headphones. Hernani’s work adds the programmatic sound recording to live coding with sounds captured beforehand. The walk functions as a way to capture sounds, but instead of editing them with a DAW, the PSLCS system directly places the sound into the SuperCollider ecosystem to modify it with code. The sound does not pass through the edition process; it remains a representation of sound in a buffer. This brings a relationship with sound in live coding where you do not see the waveform but listen to the sound and manipulate it just by ear.
5. DISCUSSION
The examples presented have similarities and differences. They happened in the contexts of technology, research and performance. Although these cases occurred during the pandemic, this is not part of the topic of each work; instead, that situation was just a detonator. In the cases of Lucy, Niklas and Hernani, they try different ways to do their practices, whereas the case of Aide’s art installation was the result of research. The common point is that all the soundworks show the improvisation, which characterises live coding, with the sounds of the environment or those produced onsite by the live coders. Also, the different soundscapes were mediated by microphones and algorithms.
In all the examples, soundwalking plays an important role. Niklas did not just play from a random spot; to find the soundscape, he took a walk. Likewise, Lucy came to the idea of playing outside while walking with a group of artists. For her part, Aide took walks in some places of Mexico City to record the sounds she used in her art installation. For his part, Hernani walked along routes of the city familiar to him, carrying a computational device to record sounds. So, walking to choose a place to perform or to record sounds connects these works.
A difference between the works is the place they occur. The live coding performances took place in natural environments, while the art installation and the soundwalking took place in the city. Something that prevails in all cases is the curiosity to try new things and use technology differently. It also highlights the discourse around the notion of the non-expert, especially in the installation, who approaches programming through live coding.
In this way, this article has tried to establish a dialogue between live coding and other sound art practices, as well as a reflection on the algorithmic device that shapes the sound of an environment. This dialogue brings terms such as expand (Biserna Reference Biserna2022) or hybridise (Di Próspero, Reference Di Próspero2015; Carvalhais and Lee Reference Carvalhais and Lee2019) to the sound practices involved. This prompts a redefinition of live coding as a combined, expanded or hybrid computational creative practice.
With this article, I hope to add to the discussion of soundscape, usually focused on composition with a strong relationship to electroacoustic music, as Brona (Reference Brona2018), Truax (Reference Truax2008), and Westerkamp (Reference Westerkamp2002) have written. Unlike live coding, which essentially is an improvisation practice (Rohrhuber and De Campo Reference Rohrhuber, De Campo, Assayag and Gerzso2006). This article contributes to reflecting on the meaning of walking, listening and space in contemporary digital sound practices.
The combination of live coding and the sound practices mentioned cannot be seen as unique in the sense that soundscape, soundwalking and sound art installation are composed of diverse disciplines. That is to say, the works presented follow a historical line that comes from years ago and that can be seen in diverse sound practices. Live coding, as a digital sound practice, has arrived at these intersections as other sound practices reached years ago. Nevertheless, beyond this article’s examples and cases, there is a scarce intention of live coders to do live coding outside. Finally, I hope to have shown the possibility of live coding to dialogue with other practices to expand, combine and hybridise itself.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Lucy Cheesman, Niklas Reppel and Aide Violeta Fuentes-Barron for the time taken to generously answer the questions regarding their live coding performances and art practices.
