Live coding with the Noiseborder Ensemble

Live coding with the Noiseborder Ensemble

Thursday night (February 27, 2014) the Noiseborder Ensemble presented its first live coding event at the University of Windsor; Martin Schiller, Anthony Giglio, and I were patching audio in Max while Nic de Cosson was generating graphics using Quartz Composer (using our audio feed for controller data input) and Sigi Torinus was generating text projections using Processing. Sigi is putting together a video clip of the event, but for now here are a couple of photos and some comments.

We took a purist approach this time out: no prepared audio or video, no sub-patches or abstractions in Max, and no help files. This meant that we only patched what we could do from memory, limiting our efforts somewhat. It was challenging and fun all the same. As with other forms of improvisation, it’s almost surely more interesting for the performers than the audience, but we got some appreciative comments and will probably do something similar in the future.

My patch ended up with three areas: a very simple one that mixed sustained sine tones generated with multiple cycle~ objects, one that used saw~ objects in combination with envelopes, and one for recording vocal sounds into multiple buffers for looping and scrubbing. Discussing afterwards, the ensemble agreed that next time out we might prepare some materials in advance to allow for more complex audio and visual textures, but I still like the idea of starting from scratch.

NBE_live_coding