From August 18th –August 19th the Tidal Club New Moon Marathon took place. The editors of the Toplap blog interviewed some of their performers. Click on the squares below to see their responses.
Original idea:
Abhiraj Das Ghosh & Iris Saladino. Design: Luis Navarro
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Bong Lebowski
Ángel Jara
th4
Maxwell Neely-Cohen
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Bong Lebowski
> How do you think your artistic practice influenced what you played at Tidal Club New Moon?
I have been into music for about a decade. I never had much of a formal training, and learnt music scales and modes through mathematical patterns. That lead to my performance piece at Tidal Club New Moon as well.
I have been fascinated by patterns, visual and aural – both. My set was aimed at creating a sense of happier times, given the current scenario worldwide. I used instruments that I could relate to from my childhood – the piano (used in school) and the vibraphone (we used to get them at fairs when we were young). Combining both of them to create simple generative patterns. I hope it worked out well!
> What barriers do you see to getting into live coding? How could we work on taking them down?
I think one area where everyone gets stuck is documentation. While theoretically the documentation exists very well on Wiki, practical explanations of how to use them would be really helpful. I learnt most of what I do from these tutorials or run-through videos available on YouTube. So an official training of sorts would be great. I know Alex has been working on it with the Tidal Club classes, there’s some fair amount of documentation being processed for other platforms like Sonic Pi and Hydra too. But probably not enough for building your own instruments on SuperCollider or how to perform with a Lisp-based tool like Extempore.
> What inspired you to create music with coding?
I’m an introvert, and never could go ahead an form a band. But I have always wanted to make music. Coding allows me to remove the barrier of being dependent on others and create a full tune on my own. That was one of the main driving factors. Plus, we can all agree that it is very cool to do so! Being a musician or coder, we often don’t think how logic or algorithms can be implemented on regular things, it just makes the learning process easier, in my opinion.
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Ángel Jara
> How do you think your artistic practice influenced what you played at Tidal Club New Moon?
Esta pregunta se puede responder pensando las distintas cosas que hice y que estudié. Últimamente puede ser que esté en una etapa más experimental. O que por fin vaya entendiendo qué quiere decir experimental. Mi práctica en todo caso es indistinguible de la teoría que consumo. Y de hecho la obra que presenté está basado en un texto de Carlos Marx, literalmente, cree unas muestras de audio con un texto de Marx sobre el trabajo alienado y jugué con eso durante la actuación. Digamos que la experiencia del live coding está fuertemente condicionado por mi teoría y mi práctica anteriores. Y que ahora el live coding hace parte de esa ecología y hace reverberar nuevas posibilidades.
> What barriers do you see to getting into live coding? How could we work on taking them down?
No veo ninguna barrera, más allá de la propia resistencia del medio. No conozco tanto la organización como para sugerir qué se puede hacer para romper las barreras. Me parece que la barrera más grande es la difusión. Yo comencé a hacer live coding desde que conocí la disciplina en 2017 con sonic Pi, antes de eso fue imposible. Después es cuestión de encontrar tiempo para hacer esto. Eso es lo más difícil.
> Let’s talk about your style of music. Tell us how you go about creating a track or tune?
Or do you prefer to improvise?
Suelo empezar con un track vacío y voy buscando samples que me interesen explorar. A veces copio partes de un script que me gustó de un tema anterior y lo modifico en el script nuevo. Y crear el track es improvizar. Nunca suena igual, es un estilo de mucha improvisación, me parece.
Aquí se pueden ver mis hydras:
Tweets by BruvePing
y aquí algunos temas musicales que hice y posteé, si varios estan hechos con Pure Data, algunos están hechos con Sonic Pi
https://soundcloud.com/angel-jara-606595818
y esto es un Play list que estoy armando con lo que estoy haciendo de Tidal Cycles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mnTMUsGwt8&list=PLynD0thQYh7blzxp5nJk3cl-_gmzLUqpK
Les estoy muy agradecido por dejarme participar, y me parece muy meritorio lo democrático de la convocatoria.
les envío un abrazo muy grande!!!
Ángel Jara
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th4
Hello!
Thank you for organizing this event, it was really awesome to be part of
it!
> Let’s talk about your style of music. Tell us how you go about creating a track or tune?
Or do you prefer to improvise?
Most of the musical ideas that end up being used in my tracks stem from
solo improvisation session that I try to constrain myself to do
regularly (precisely to enrich my pool of snippets from which to draw
when composing). These impro sessions are usually developed from one or
two ideas, which could be a melody, a chord progression, a process for
generating patterns in mini tidal notation, a tidal function I want to
play with, or anything else really! I then let the code rest for some
time on my hard drive, and when I come back to it I “extract” the ideas
that I deem worth using in a track.
When playing live, I usually start with pre-written patterns that I
modify live in a non-predetermined way. I also enjoy improvisation from
scratch, but it is a difficult exercise and I’m not feeling confident
enough to play that way regularly.
Recently, I’ve been exploring interaction between live-coding and more
traditional ways of music creation, by crafting a live-coded
accompaniment to a vocal sample that I composed and sung myself, which
is what I played during my set for the New Moon algorave. I don’t think
this is anything groundbreaking conceptually, but I’m pretty happy with
how it turned out!
> Tell us about yourself in brief.
How did you get into live coding?
I’m a computer scientist by training, and my master’s thesis was on
lambda-calculus, so that gives some hint as to why the Haskell part of
tidal attracted me (even though I didn’t actually know Haskell
beforehand). I’ve also always been interested in music, more
specifically the “putting out into the world a piece of music that
didn’t exist beforehand” part of it, which I find to be absolutely
magical. Starting from there, I couldn’t not hop on the possibility to
create music with a language that I had some natural affinity with when
I had it.
For a more down-to-earth response: I saw an announcement of a new
version of Tidal or something like that on Hacker News (yes, I know),
thought it was awesome, spent the next three months trying to make a
sound with it (I think the installation process has been improved
since), and then started experimenting with it.
> Anything else?
I guess this is the “make up you own question” field, so I’m gonna talk
about my musical inspirations in general.
Well, I’m pretty much the “listened to too much Pink Floyd and loves
music from people who listened to too much Pink Floyd” type. I love to
create chill-but-melodic music, with long developments along the piece,
as well as conceptually strong albums (even though this last part will
remain a hypothetical until I release the album I’m currently working
on).
I’m also a big fan of New Wave/post-punk, but I’m not sure it’s as
obvious in my music as the last part.
Social media:
* Twitter: https://twitter.com/th4music
* Instagram: https://instagram.com/th4music/
* Website: https://th4music.net
Thank you again for the marathon, and for what you do to keep the
community running!
Cheers,
th4
(photo by Clément Merle)
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Maxwell Neely-Cohen
> What barriers do you see to getting into live coding? How could we work on taking them down?
The more tools can be made to be easy to install, access, and share work from, the better. Also rhetorically I think there needs to be more emphasis on performance. How one creates art, how one emotionally experiences that creation, how one connects to others. That is more valuable to me than any demonstration of particular code.
> Tell us about yourself in brief. How did you get into live coding?
I had a career in music as a DJ/producer in my teens and early 20s, but ended up becoming a novelist. A few years ago I started undertaking experiments with literature and technology, which lead to experiments with technology and performance more generally. I would indiscriminately keep an eye out for different art-related technology practices, which lead me to a live coding Hydra workshop taught by Zach Krall. I loved his workshop, and was asked there by Messica Arson to participate in an algorave that was going to feature all new live coders. I learned the basics of Orca in a few weeks, and found myself seduced by the experience of performing with it. Zach and I ended up collaborating and performing together many times.
> What inspired you to create music with coding?
I just love live coding as a pursuit. A community. An environment. This form and world that is welcoming and predicated on exploration instead of achievement. On searching for something even if no one defines what that something is. Live coding has inoculated itself against the worst incentives of both technology and the performing arts as industries or scenes, and I find that unique and glorious. It keeps me coming back.
Here’s my socials:
* https://twitter.com/nhyphenc
* https://www.instagram.com/_maxnc_/
Naoto Hieda (vc-study)
Jessica Rodríguez
Derek Kwan
sp4ghet and service center
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Naoto Hieda (vc-study)
> Let’s talk about your style of music. Tell us how you go about creating a track or tune? Or do you prefer to improvise?
I followed the tutorial on TidalCycles website, and then I started playing with the patterns. I also read some codes on Atsushi Tadokoro’s repository to see some hands-on techniques. Then I learned that a densely packed pattern from n to sound creates a synth-like effect rather than a pattern:
d1 $ n "[0 .. 31](3,8)" # sound "supersaw"
Then, after playing with the pattern string, I start to add filters with sometimesBy or every condition:
d1 $ every 2 (# crush "2") $ n "[0 .. 31](3,8)" # sound "supersaw"
Also pan and gain can be used in conjunction with low frequency oscillators saw and rand:
d1 $ every 2 (# crush "2") $ n "[0 .. 31](3,8)" # sound "supersaw" # gain saw
What I found interesting is that at the end, prefixing the line with slow N decomposes the built-up synth into a rather standard tidal beat.
d1 $ slow 8 $ every 2 (# crush "2") $ n "[0 .. 31](3,8)" # sound "supersaw"
This is the basic strategy to build up the sound, and I found most of them through trial and error.
Tell us about yourself in brief. How did you get into live coding?
vc-study is an informal collective of Japanese artists and programmers learning or studying different creative-code related tools from scratch every week. One of the members, @FMS_Cat created tidal-bot that runs on Discord, interprets TidalCycles code mentioned on the chat and outputs sound on the voice chat. It is a neat implementation as many people can join and perform together, a similar goal as estuary but with a different approach.
TidalCycles (and Haskell) has been in our list to learn, and we found the New Moon streaming was open for participation. It was written that
> all welcome to grab one, especially beginners
which encourage me to register and to convince Naoaki (@naokiring) and FMS_Cat to participate in the jam. Also it helped me that I have been around the live-coding scene for a while (although I have not performed until recent) and I knew that the crowd is more welcoming than criticizing.
Apart from live coding music, are you into any other forms of art through coding?
I use Hydra and wrote the Hydra Book, which gave me confidence to perform; the experience of hacking into a live-coding tool to find what is not intended and to systematically understand the misuse, which seems to be my strength.
Naoto Hieda @naoto_hieda
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Jessica Rodríguez
> Tell us about yourself in brief.
How did you get into live coding?
I am Jessica Arianne Rodríguez. I am from Mexico but I am currently living in Hamilton, Canada. When I started my art projects, I initially experimented just with video, collaborating with composers to produce audiovisual pieces. These collaborations offered me a learning environment for me to experiment with sound (something that has became most prominent in my art practice in the last three years). Right before finishing my undergrad, my dad and I funded andamio.in, a collaboration platform with the idea to experiment with visuals, literature, and sound in either research, education or art projects. Parallelly, (also in my undergrad) I found out about the live coding community in Mexico and I started to research live coding practices within this particular context. Although I was interested in live coding practices, I was also very reluctant to use them in my own practice. I understood the pedagogical layers of sharing the code, as well as the activism practices of working with open source tools but, at the same time, I was not interested in projecting the code in my art pieces. The live coding language didn’t help either. I mostly work with video textures and most of the lc languages are focused on either vectors or shadders textures. Two years ago, andamio.in had the opportunity to present a piece at the Electronic Literature Conference (ELO). This challenge pushed me to find new ways to explore the literature/text aspects in graphic terms, colliding live coding practices with literature. After my experience in ELO, I found a lot of similarities between live coding and electronic literature. Since then, I have been trying to explore the poetical aspects of projecting the programing language that enables a sound or a visual texture to exist, mostly exploring with esolangs for specific projects and inquiries.
> Let’s talk about your style of music. Tell us how you go about creating a track or tune? Or do you prefer to improvise?
In sonic terms, I work mostly with voice samples. To this, other sounds (usually from instruments) are added, alongside with video (figurate textures). I mostly work with driven improvisation. This improvisation happens in-between periods of time. This is the process that I follow every time that I will present or experiment with something new. 1) First, I prepare my audios. I am working with voice that is a product of someone reading a literary text. I either record the text myself, record somebody else, or use a recording from someone else. I have a full version of the poem in an audio file but, additionally, I also have the poem divided into many samples. Usually, one sentence represents a sample. 2) I started to improvise with these samples, deciding if I will be working purely with voice or if I will add visuals or other sounds. 3) I had a draft score based in units of time deciding (in general terms) what will happen in each section 4). Finally, I improvise over that.
> How do you think your artistic practice influenced what you played at Tidal Club New Moon?
In this performance, I remix a poem by Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral, called “País de la Ausencia”. This project is part of some experiments around using the voice of women poets. A voice that represents both in the poem itself and the voice that reads that poem. As I mentioned, in the last two years I have been exploring with the collision between electronic literature (or e-poetry) and live coding practices. It has been interesting for me to understand programming languages such as tidal cycles beyond certain music styles, being techno what is usually linked to this language. In this journey, I’ve played with different tidal cycles’ functions, identifying which ones enhanced the e-poetry aesthetics of working with voice samples. After this process, I understand my practices as speech that is activated live. Every time a line of code is evaluated, I evaluate written speech that enables a sonic speech to appear. This speech can be presented in many ways, 1) a series of images that go one after the other, 2) a juxtaposition of speeches (voices) that add and mute themselves, and 3) as a deconstructed speech. In aesthetic terms, the piece that I presented for the event tries to summon the words of the author, by repeating her words in different ways, echoing her thoughts, mixing her images, shifting her voice, and presenting her through her own sonic texture.
Social Media: * https://vimeo.com/jessicaarianne
* https://www.facebook.com/ariannerod/
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Derek Kwan
> Tell us about yourself in brief. How did you get into live coding?
I went to school for percussion and got into electronic music during my doctorate. I started making music in Max, Pure Data and SuperCollider but met somebody at a conference who coded with Sonic Pi. I gave that a shot about a year later but that was a bear to install on Linux so I tried out TidalCycles and have stuck with it ever since. I appreciate the faster workflow compared to Pure Data and SuperCollider.
> Apart from live coding music, are you into any other forms of art through coding?
Pretty much everything. I use Pure Data for a lot of things: performance patches, installations, you name it. I make music in Pd and SuperCollider. I create visual art in P5.js, Processing, Three.js, and Python. I do things with Arduinos every now and then. I’m always looking for more ways to expand my artistic voice through digital means of expression.
> Let’s talk about your style of music. Tell us how you go about creating a track or tune?
Or do you prefer to improvise?
I semi-improvise for my live sets. I code up a few little musical ideas here and there and share them on Instagram. When a live set comes up, I pore through my Instagram highlights and pick out ones that I think are interesting and expand on them. When it comes to a live set, I have everything more or less coded out but I have a game plan in my head of how things are supposed to go more or less but I leave the actual performance of commenting and uncommenting things and executing bits of code and the actual pacing of the tune up to the moment. I improvise on acoustic instruments and I should really practice on straight up improvising in TidalCycles so I get more comfy with it all.
website: https://www.derekxkwan.com
* instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dxkzh/
* twitter: https://twitter.com/derekxkwan
* mastodon: https://post.lurk.org/@mrufrufin
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sp4ghet (sp) and service center (sc)
> What barriers do you see to getting into live coding? How could we work on taking them down?
(sp) Obviously, the first barrier would be that they aren’t aware it exists. Roughly half of the software engineers and programming / comp sci people I meet don’t know about algorave. Extrapolating from that, people who aren’t into programming at all probably don’t get many chances to find out about the scene. Getting people to enjoy listening and watching live coding performances is probably a good start, regardless of whether they eventually become participants or not.
In that sense, I found the UK algorave scene to be more danceable than the Japanese algorave scene which is probably helping quite a lot. (Also having events at public spaces like the British Library instead of just underground clubs also helps.)
(sc) I think it’s mainly preconceptions. People might feel that programming is complicated, or it’s for very narrow types of music.
In that sense, it is helpful to have a learning platform like the tidal club, and I think this new moon marathon has contributed a lot to this because it didn’t limit people to a specific genre.
> Tell us about yourself in brief.
How did you get into live coding?
(sp) I found out about algorave when my high school english teacher who was REALLY into Haskell shared with me a youtube video of one of yaxu’s performances. I’ve always been more into computer graphics and visuals than music, so it was lucky for me that the show had visuals. I went to Algorave Tokyo in person a few years later and met some people who also did live coding or similar activities like VJ-ing and became friends with them. I also started working with veda.gl and became a contributor to veda and met amagi (who made veda) a few times before my first performance. I would say I’m more of the cowardly type so having all of these influences finally got me off my butt and I went for it and did my first performance.
(sc) I’ve always been interested in learning a functional programming language. And of course, since I’m stuck at home under these circumstances, I thought I’d enjoy it anyway, so I gave Tidal Cycles a try. It turns out its great fun, with a welcoming community.
> Anything else?
(sp) Big thanks to yaxu and everyone at TidalClub for organizing this event, I know I had a lot of fun and I’m sure many others had a lot of fun too. I know organizing events is a big pain and I’m sure doing it all online had its own challenges.
(sc) I can’t thank enough to yaxu and all of the people who made this happen. We’re all in this together, and this certainly put some load off from our shoulders.
social media:
sp4ghet:
* https://sp4ghet.com/
* https://twitter.com/sp4ghet
service center:
* https://www.yasushisakai.com/
* https://twitter.com/yasushisakai/
Thats it and stay safe!
Dan Gorelick
Shihpin
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Dan Gorelick
>Tell us about yourself in brief. How did you get into live coding?
I’m a lifelong musician who at the last minute went to engineering school instead of music conservatory. I spent four years learning about coding, and fell into creative coding (using processing, web dev etc). It wasn’t until I discovered live coding with TidalCycles (via the livecode.nyc community) that I was able to mix coding and music in a way that allows me to feel like I can be expressive musically with code.
> What barriers do you see to getting into live coding? How could we work on taking them down?
Installing TidalCycles has always been tricky for folks who don’t have experience using a command line. I would be happy to dedicate some development time and energy towards helping improve that process! (seriously).
> Let’s talk about your style of music. Tell us how you go about creating a track or tune? Or do you prefer to improvise?
My style of music when livecoding has become a mix of blues piano and house music. I prepare by knowing which drum samples I will use, choosing a synth patch, and for this performance deciding to use some bird sounds 🙂 Besides that the rest of this set was improvisation! It is so much fun for me to perform with TidalCycles because it gives me extra hands by allowing me to send MIDI signals to the synth.
> Anything else?
Another small ask is to add some meta data to the names of the videos uploaded to YouTube. It’s a small complaint, and I can appreciate just how much energy goes into streaming, and posting the videos in the first place. Thank you so, so much for running this. It’s always so great to have more community events happening.
Take care all – thanks so much!
best,
Dan
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Shihpin
> Let’s talk about your style of music. Tell us how you go about creating a track or tune? Or do you prefer to improvise?
I try to complete with a series of do blocks and improvise when recording to be posted on my soundcloud ( soundcloud.com/shihpin-lin) Recently “all $ …” had become available, which I really like.
> Tell us about yourself in brief. How did you get into live coding?
I was always interested in text-based synthesis. Initially Csound (bought the instruments CD-ROM from Dr. B)
, then Supercollider.
> What inspired you to create music with coding?
I used to try to use traditional DAW like Ableton but didn’t quite work for me. Since my day work is translating, using a system like Tidal works much better.
> Anything else?
Please go have a listen, my soundcloud: soundcloud.com/shihpin-lin
QBRNTHSS (Ramon Casamajó)
Rafrobeat
Messica Arson
Isaac Medina
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QBRNTHSS
> Let’s talk about your style of music. Tell us how you go about creating a track or tune? Or do you prefer to improvise?
It depends a lot on the context and the project that I’m working on at the moment, but improvisation is definitely a fundamental part of my musical practice. When I’m live coding as QBRNTHSS I always have an inner fight trying to figure out if it’s better to do more from scratch thing or to write more prepared code. Recently I’m choosing more often the second one, because I think my from scratch skills are still very limited. But I love to do from scratch sessions, probably because I love improvised music.
> Tell us about yourself in brief. How did you get into live coding?
QBRNTHSS (pronounced “quebrantahuesos”, bearded vulture in spanish) is the alias that I use for my solo works focused on electronics and live coding. As QBRNTHSS I’ve released a split LP (“Harry Dean Stanton”, Call It Anything Records 2019), and I’m usually participating in algoraves, sessions and workshops organized by the Toplap Barcelona collective, in which I am actively involved. I have also participated in other online events hosted by Toplap international community. As a musician and computer scientist I find in live coding the union of two of my passions: music and technology. I first heard about live coding around 2012 in a Supercollider workshop, but it wasn’t until 2018 when I began to go to Toplap Barcelona sessions and I discovered Sonic Pi and later Tidal Cycles that I run totally into it.
> Anything else?
I’m also part of Turing Tarpit playing trumpet and electronics, a duet with whom I’ve released several works and regularly played in the experimental underground circuit of Barcelona. And I run the micro record label Call It Anything Records, which next release will be a compilation of live coding tracks by members of Toplap Barcelona! I’m very excited and happy about that!
Social media:
* https://callitanythingrecords.bandcamp.com/album/harry-dean-stanton
* https://soundcloud.com/qbrnthss
(photo by Andrés Costa)
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Rafrobeat
> Let’s talk about your style of music. Tell us how you go about creating a track or tune? Or do you prefer to improvise?
I love the process of thinking the songs, I prefer to put the song together in advance, the ideas almost always come while I enjoy listening to music at home. All part of a simple sample that gets into my head, I sit on my computer, edit the sample, play with the times of the sample and if I like it and I feel the possibility of a party song coming back, I take it to my tidalcyles library and the magic begins.
I see in this creative process that if there is improvisation, then I rehearse a track a lot and there are always many variants of my song. Then live I already define that improvisation according to the mood of the day, of the party, of the energy!
> Tell us about yourself in brief. How did you get into live coding? What inspired you to create music with coding?
It all starts in a livecoding workshop given by Olivia Jack and Alexandra Cardenas in Bogotá, Colombia. A friend tells me, I present myself to the call for the workshop and I am chosen.
When I come to the TopLapBogotá community and feel that big hug that we give each other in the community, my life changes completely. I get a lot of knowledge and a lot of affection. In the same way, I decide to teach, accompany and give affection.
These topLap guiding principles make me a better human being.
I was inspired from the beginning by my two great passions in life have been programming and playing music and video at parties (djing / vjing). I’m interested in my sound and video being party and very Latin. I am interested in showing the latinidad to which I belong. Cumbia, Salsa, Champeta and a lot of tropical music is what is found in my work.
> Apart from live coding music, are you into any other forms of art through coding? Anything else?
Of course. I love everything visual, thinking about generating video with code has also been very important to me. I’m also interested in audio reactivity in simple devices with arduino, or with a simple transistor. I also like to think about generating costumes, masks with audio reactivity. The clothes for my livecoding rituals. I really enjoy this practice. I love starting something new in practice, and playing festivals like this is fun and rewarding for me.
Love it.
You can listen and see my work on my website ->
https://www.rafrobeat.com
bandcamp ->
https://rafrobeat.bandcamp.com/
soundcloud ->
https://soundcloud.com/rafrobeat
mixcloud ->
https://www.mixcloud.com/rafrobeat
instagram ->
https://www.instagram.com/rafrobeat
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Messica Arson
>
How do you think your artistic practice influenced what you played at Tidal Club New Moon?
I typically use FoxDot for shows, and this was my second show with TidalCycles which felt very exciting and new. I’ve been playing roughly the same set for a year at this point, and this show was the first in a long time I did something different. As an artist, I never want to stay static or keep doing the same things. I played my set from a closet, which I think gave the set a more spooky vibe and was feeling very inspired by it.
> What barriers do you see to getting into live coding? How could we work on taking them down?
Streaming sets can be hard but it is so exciting to be able to play a big global show like this one. I love 24-hour shows and loved watching so many acts. It’s so easy to feel lonely right now with COVID and everything in the world and playing this show made me feel a lot more connected to a global community.
> Let’s talk about your style of music. Tell us how you go about creating a track or tune? Or do you prefer to improvise?
My music is all about exploring the tension between creating something beautiful and destroying it all. I like to play with layers and textures of sounds. I typically start with a blank slate (or blank editor) and build it up as I go. I usually have some idea how my set will begin and end but I don’t know what path I’ll take to get there.
> Tell us about yourself in brief.
How did you get into live coding?
I started making music in punk and hardcore scenes and incorporated screams in my sets. It’s great when feeling nervous about a show to be able to scream to start it off. Screaming through technical difficulties always feels especially satisfying.
> What inspired you to create music with coding?
I got started live coding with Sonic Pi, I loved that the documentation is right in the IDE. I started with the example code and just edited it until it felt like something that was uniquely my own.
> Apart from live coding music, are you into any other forms of art through coding?
I’m interested in exploring new ways to connect with my audience. I wrote some code once to let audience members Tweet at me to change my sounds; I’d like to explore similar themes in my future work.
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Isaac Medina
> How do you think your artistic practice influenced what you played at Tidal Club New Moon?
I usually do ambient noise using hardware synths and Pure Data, but recently I’ve been listening to Garage, Grime and Broken Beat. This music inspired me to grab my synths, drumsticks and to jam. When the call to participate at the Tidal Club New Moon Marathon was released, I knew that it was time for me to perform the ideas that were bouncing in my head.
> Tell us about yourself in brief. How did you get into live coding?
As I was 12 years old, I used to go to drum practice at a local music school where there were 4 acoustic kits and 1 electric. I always chose the electric one because at home we had an acoustic and I guess my ears wanted some rest as I was practicing every day and hitting hard. Cables and jacks from the electric kit captured my attention and made me wonder: how expandable is this instrument? So the research to find the limits of drumming began. Slowly and at the right time I found out what MIDI, a sequencer and a synth were, and eventually all my questions pointed to code.
Live coding is very recent for me, I’ve patched live in Pure Data and demoed my findings with prepared code, but I really started using TidalCycles for about 4 months. Personally, drumming and music-coding are deeply engaged: if there wasn’t an electric drum kit at that local school, chances are I wouldn’t be here.
> Apart from live coding music, are you into any other forms of art through coding?
Processing sketches come every now and then. I’m also starting with HTML and CSS to build websites for my projects and personal portfolio.
*Here is my instagram account, the social platform I use the most: https://www.instagram.com/isaac.medina/
Nil Hartman
Daniel McShane
Mook
redesdenadie
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Nil Hartman
> What inspired you to create music with coding?
Hail to Renick Bell and Kindohm : I got into live-coding after discovering their respective stellar records.
As a computer musician, I’ve been experimenting with MIDI sequencing for almost 2 decades now, and in early 2019 I took the plunge and gave Tidal a go. An hour later I was a zealous convertee haha : I instantly gelled with its terse langage and syntax, I suppose my brain works the same way. A rejuvenating experience that reinjected heaps of fun into music making.
Tidal’s hands down the most inspiring and intuitive sequencer I’ve ever tried (and I’ve used many). It has turn my computer into a proper instrument I can practice and play : I’ve dreamt of such a thing forever.
Now I deliberately ignore its audio related features, as I’m super happy with the handful of synths I use. I’ve integrated coding into my craft instead of (once again) reinventing my own wheel.
How do you think your artistic practice influenced what you played at Tidal Club New Moon?
I utterly admire anyone starting from a blank page in front of an audience. Yet I’d rather keep the creative, compositional process private, and can’t help thinking that no one needs to hear me on an uninspired day… Not to mention that, to me, textures are as much as important as notes and grooves, and sound-design and engineering are tedious, time-consuming tasks. The end-result is at least equally as important as the journey.
So instead I went for some spontaneous, freeform rearrangement / remixing of to-be released tunes. I took existing code from my upcoming EPs and jammed out of it. Everything you hear is generated on the fly (not a sample nor preset used, just synthesis) which emphasizes the unique, ephemeral nature of each performance.
Eons ago I played +150 gigs, but Tidal Club New Moon was my first algorithmic one. Definitely not the last one (quite the opposite really).
> Let’s talk about your style of music. Tell us how you go about creating a track or tune? Or do you prefer to improvise?
I’m by no mean a code-wizard, I build upon simple patterns and go with the flow. I used to be an awfully authoritative dictator with my music, forcing my ways no matter what on the music… and it was depressing and counterproductive.
Now with Tidal I feel like I listen and collaborate with what I hear instead, and it’s so liberating. I code, patch synths, music happens and I react. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes the output is beyond awesome, sometimes it sucks big time, and it’s ok.
Most tunes begin with a « what if ? », and I then try to answer that very question.
I tend to first compose / do all the sound design, then engineer the tune before finally recording a release-ready version. So that once the recording is complete, the tune is done as well and ready to be mastered.
Social media: https://nilhartman.bandcamp.com/
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Daniel McShane
> Tell us about yourself in brief. How did you get into live coding?
I’m admiral bellybutton (Daniel McShane). I came to live coding via SuperCollider and, tangentially, the Disquiet Junto. I was looking for a quicker way to generate ideas. I struggle with syntax, order of operations, and math! It’s hard for me to make the brain to code transition. I stumbled upon EulerRoom during the latest solstice rave and was hooked. I wanted to learn how to do THAT.
Let’s talk about your style of music. Tell us how you go about creating a track or tune? Or do you prefer to improvise?
I’m all over the map. I’ve dabbled in lots of things, some with form some without. Lately, I’ve been trying to improve how I use “random” generators like MidiMadness, and Riffer in conjunction with tools like Scaler and Suggester for the structured stuff. I’m now seeing the benefits of learning TidalCycles. I still struggle with improvisation, but am hoping to improve. I’m in awe of the talent I’ve seen/heard.
What barriers do you see to getting into live coding? How could we work on taking them down?
The barriers for me are all mental. The tools are very easy to install and configure. It’s the learning curve… which is different for everyone. I’m still on the up slope.
Thanks for listening.
Social media: * http://sattvastudio.com/media/
* https://soundcloud.com/admiralbellybutton
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Mook
My name is Mook and I am from Saint Louis Missouri in the United States. I learned about live coding from this tweet “https://twitter.com/lildata/status/1250158507367817216?lang=en” and the tweet then used to link to a post showing Alex’s online workshop for learning tidal during Quarantine. It was the perfect time to get into trying to learn it since
I had much more free time due to being laid off from my job and school being online. I had also been messing around with ableton just a little before it but was hoping to find something that combined music with coding, I study Computer Science in University, and live coding seemed like the perfect fit.
Right now the way I have been using tidal is trying to make a remix of a song that I like and seeing where it will take me. My goal however is to be able to get a lot more comfortable with doing all or most of the coding live and improvising with it but I am still getting comfortable with it, it’s just like learning a new instrument.
My twitter is https://twitter.com/QMVG_
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redesdenadie
> What barriers do you see to getting into live coding? How could we work on taking them down?
People from my generation have a preconception about using the computer as a live instrument usually to the point of mockery, we might have a chance to change that by sharing creations and our enthusiasm about live coding and the free open qualities of this world which allows almost anyone with a computer to start making Music right away.
> Let’s talk about your style of music. Tell us how you go about creating a track or tune? Or do you prefer to improvise?
There´s a zillion ways of creating a track, lately i enjoy to record on a setup based on tidal and tree physical synths and effects and just play simple lines with a lot of tweaking on the run, coding is not so dynamic in my act as i see it happening on other acts, but im looking forward to discover more functions and break my own compositional biases and limitations.
> What inspired you to create music with coding?
A year ago i wanted an octatrack so bad (insane sampler) it was in my plans but i got kicked out of the job i was at, and a the same time a friend told me about a free tidal class imparted by CNDSD, i assisted and there i had my eureka moment where i found out about live coding and been using it since.
Thanks!!!
Social media:
* Twitter: @redesdenadie
* Instagram: @redesdenadie
* website: http://www.redesdenadie.com
