Was performed at:
“But Algorave is about bringing algorithms a bit more into the foreground, haunted a bit by rave; some promise of less focus on the musician and more on each other, and a serious kind of dedication to having some fun.” - Alex McLean.1
Algoraves were invented, or so live coding lore has it, to take live coding out of an academic context and make it fun for both audience and performer. For me, there’s not much fun in repeating myself, and as a result my Algorave performances are somewhat eclectic. Sometimes they sound a bit like german EBM from the 80s, sometimes like footwork, and sometimes like a free jazz drummer playing on a TB909. Sometimes they contain the occasional cover song, and sometimes they have random animal noises or cartoon quotes sprinkled in (there’s no fun in taking the fun too seriously either).
The abstract is displayed here for proof-reading and will only be part of the published proceedings, not of the final version of this web catalogue.
“But Algorave is about bringing algorithms a bit more into the foreground, haunted a bit by rave; some promise of less focus on the musician and more on each other, and a serious kind of dedication to having some fun.” - Alex McLean1
Algraves were invented, or so live coding lore has it, to take live coding out of an academic context and make it fun for both audience and performer. For me, there’s not much fun in repeating myself, and as a result my Algorave performances are somewhat eclectic. Sometimes they sound a bit like german EBM from the 80ies, sometimes like footwork, and sometimes like a free jazz drummer playing on a TB909. Sometimes they contain the occasional cover song, and sometimes they have random animal noises or cartoon quotes sprinkled in (there’s no fun in taking the fun too seriously either).
The sets also reflect the development of my language, Mégra,2 a lisp-like DSL for live coding sound and music. Over time, I externalized enough of my live coding experience into the language, and it became abstract (or concise) enough to allow me to (typically) start from scratch or with little prepared code. Its affordances, many of which reflect the “small data” idea presented at a previous ICLC,3 help me with letting the sets reflect the rhythms, sounds and styles that I’m interested in at the time. The sets freely mix samples and synths, sometimes using samples I found and recorded “in the wild”, sometimes using completely artificial samples resulting from not-so-successful experiments with neural networks (i.e. here).
The Mégra System - Small Data Music Composition and Live Coding Performance - https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3939154 ↩