Will be presented at:
Punctual is a live notation for unified audiovisual improvisations, intended as a vehicle to think about the unique possibilities of live coding languages. Distinctive features include a strong emphasis on unified notations for audio and visual results, semantics that privilege processes of combinatorial variation, and fundamental orientation to the liveness of the live coding situation, in which programs are improvised and updated on-the-fly. Recently rewritten from the ground up (version 0.5), the new Punctual introduces a unique matrix semantics for combinatorial variations, allows for linked libraries of Punctual code (supporting complexity and modulating the theatre of what is shared live with an audience versus prepared in advance), and features a new audio engine based entirely on the Web Audio API's audio worklets. This paper is the first scholarly account of Punctual since its emergence in 2018. It describes the contexts for the emergence of the language (particularly in relation to collaborative audiovisual experiments in the ecosystem of the Estuary collaborative platform), its history of development, the motivating considerations and results of the 0.5 rewrite, and identifies areas for further work.