Liveness in programming environments generally refers to the ability to modify a running program. Liveness is one form of a more general class of behaviors by a programming environment that provide information to programmers about what they are constructing. This paper gives a brief historical perspective on liveness and proposes an extension of a hierarchy given in 1990, to now account for even more powerful execution-oriented tools for programmers. In addition, while liveness concerns the timeliness of execution feedback, considering a broader array of forms of feedback is helpful both in better understanding liveness and in designing ever more powerful development tools.

A perspective on the evolution of live programming

This interdisciplinary volume introduces new theories and ideas on creativity from the perspectives of science and art. Featuring contributions from leading researchers, theorists and artists working in artificial intelligence, generative art, creative computing, music composition, and cybernetics, the book examines the relationship between computation and creativity from both analytic and practical perspectives. Each contributor describes innovative new ways creativity can be understood through, and inspired by, computers. The book tackles critical philosophical questions and discusses the major issues raised by computational creativity, including: whether a computer can exhibit creativity independently of its creator; what kinds of creativity are possible in light of our knowledge from computational simulation, artificial intelligence, evolutionary theory and information theory; and whether we can begin to automate the evaluation of aesthetics and creativity in silico. These important, often controversial questions are contextualised by current thinking in computational creative arts practice. Leading artistic practitioners discuss their approaches to working creatively with computational systems in a diverse array of media, including music, sound art, visual art, and interactivity. The volume also includes a comprehensive review of computational aesthetic evaluation and judgement research, alongside discussion and insights from pioneering artists working with computation as a creative medium over the last fifty years. A distinguishing feature of this volume is that it explains and grounds new theoretical ideas on creativity through practical applications and creative practice. Computers and Creativity will appeal to theorists, researchers in artificial intelligence, generative and evolutionary computing, practicing artists and musicians, students and any reader generally interested in understanding how computers can impact upon creativity. It bridges concepts from computer science, psychology, neuroscience, visual art, music and philosophy in an accessible way, illustrating how computers are fundamentally changing what we can imagine and create, and how we might shape the creativity of the future. Computers and Creativity will appeal to theorists, researchers in artificial intelligence, generative and evolutionary computing, practicing artists and musicians, students and any reader generally interested in understanding how computers can impact upon creativity. It bridges concepts from computer science, psychology, neuroscience, visual art, music and philosophy in an accessible way, illustrating how computers are fundamentally changing what we can imagine and create, and how we might shape the creativity of the future.

/pdf/computers-and-creativity-38q66mcaz9.pdf

Computers and Creativity

On-the-fly programming is a style of programming in which the programmer/performer/composer augments and modifies the program while it is running, without stopping or restarting, in order to assert expressive, programmable control at runtime. Because of the fundamental powers of programming languages, we believe the technical and aesthetic aspects of on-the-fly programming are worth exploring.In this paper, we present a formalized framework for on-the-fly programming, based on the ChucK synthesis language, which supports a truly concurrent audio programming model with sample-synchronous timing, and a highly on-the-fly style of programming. We first provide a well-defined notion of on-the-fly programming. We then address four fundamental issues that confront the on-the-fly programmer: timing, modularity, conciseness, and flexibility. Using the features and properties of ChucK, we show how it solves many of these issues. In this new model, we show that (1) concurrency provides natural modularity for on-the-fly programming, (2) the timing mechanism in ChucK guarantees on-the-fly precision and consistency, (3) the Chuck syntax improves conciseness, and (4) the overall system is a useful framework for exploring on-the-fly programming. Finally, we discuss the aesthetics of on-the-fly performance.

/pdf/on-the-fly-programming-using-code-as-an-expressive-musical-3xvbjx5gqz.pdf

On-the-fly programming: using code as an expressive musical instrument

This paper considers how to achieve new creative advances in the design of programming languages. It is based on the analysis of a single application domain, the practice of Live Coding in a new area of musical performance known as "Laptop" music. Analysis of live coding as a context for programming allows us to escape the implicit assumptions of the commercial office environment in which so much end-user programming has been studied. The programming environments of the future, with increasing deployment of ubiquitous computing technologies, will be unlike offices in many ways. We can prepare for this future by studying extreme varieties of programming today. Live coding is thus an ideal research opportunity for psychology of programming This paper considers how to achieve new creative advances in the design of programming languages. It is based on the analysis of a single application domain, the practice of Live Coding in Laptop Music performance. Neither laptop music nor live coding has yet received much attention in the psychology of programming or HCI communities, so this paper also provides a brief introduction and history of the field for the benefit of programming language researchers. We believe that the study of unusual programming contexts such as Laptop music may lead to more general benefits for programming research. This is because significant advances in programming language design have often arisen by considering completely new classes of user who might engage in programming activity. In contrast, traditional programming languages are generally designed to support professional programmers and academics, and their day to day activities have changed little over the past 50 years. Conventional programming languages have become more sophisticated, but mainly in order to provide better support for the kind of work that was described quite accurately by Hartree in 1950: "Programming is the process of drawing up the schedule of the sequence of individual operations required to carry out the calculation" (Hartree 1950, p. 111). Conventional programming languages have been greatly improved by improving our mathematical understanding, and the consequent sophistication, of what Hartree describes as "schedule" and "operations". However if programming is "a process of translating from the language convenient to human beings to the language convenient to the computer" (McCracken 1957), then as Myers argues (Myers 2002), we should also spend some time trying to understand what makes a language convenient to users. There is little benefit in considering the convenience of mathematicians or computer scientists, because they are quite happy introspecting on their own experience in order to make programming languages they like, and in any case there is little research challenge in this particular translation because "the language convenient to the computer" has been structured according to mathematicians' habits of thought in the first place.

The Programming Language as a Musical Instrument

This article presents EarSketch, a learning environment that combines computer programming with sample-based music production to create a computational remixing environment for learning introductory computing concepts. EarSketch has been employed in both formal and informal settings, yielding significant positive results in student content knowledge and attitudes toward computing as a discipline, especially in ethnic and gender populations that are currently underrepresented in computing fields. This article describes the rationale and components of EarSketch, the evaluation design, and lessons learned to apply to future environment design and development.

EarSketch: A STEAM-Based Approach for Underrepresented Populations in High School Computer Science Education

Seeking new forms of expression in computer music, a small number of laptop composers are braving the challenges of coding music on the fly. Not content to submit meekly to the rigid interfaces of performance software like Ableton Live or Reason, they work with programming languages, building their own custom software, tweaking or writing the programs themselves as they perform. Often this activity takes place within some established language for computer music like SuperCollider, but there is no reason to stop errant minds pursuing their innovations in general scripting languages like Perl. This paper presents an introduction to the field of live coding, of real-time scripting during laptop music performance, and the improvisatory power and risks involved. We look at two test cases, the command-line music of slub utilising, amongst a grab-bag of technologies, Perl and REALbasic, and Julian Rohrhuber's Just In Time library for SuperCollider. We try to give a flavour of an exciting but hazardous world at the forefront of live laptop performance.

/pdf/live-coding-in-laptop-performance-1wbq9se5jc.pdf

Adrian Ward

Papers

Live coding in laptop performance

I Share, Therefore I Know? Sharing Online Content — Even Without Reading It — Inflates Subjective Knowledge

How Watching Live Streams Creates Connection and Enhances Enjoyment