Comment by bigiain
21 days ago
Some of us enjoy highly repetitive music, at least some of the time.
"Computer games don't affect kids. If Pac Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music." -- Marcus Brigstocke (probably?)
Also, related but not - YouTube's algorithm gave me this the other day - showing how to reconstruct the beat of Blue Monday by New Order:
I'm not saying anything negative about repetitive music. I'm saying that tools like live coding are going to constrain the kind of music you can produce reasonably.
I mean, sure, art has constraints.
My sister likes to work with [checks notes carefully to avoid the wrong words] old textiles. This of course constrains the kind of art she can make. That's the whole point.
I see live coding the same way as the harp, or a loop sampler, an instrument, one of an enormous variety of tools which you might find suits you or not. As performance I actually enjoy live coding far more than most ways to make music, although I thought Amon Tobin's ISAM Live was amazing that's because of the visuals.
I saw Amon Tobin about 15 years back. Still one of my favourite shows ever - and I see a _lot_ of shows.
And year, your music tools/instruments constrain you. There are only so many music genres you can reasonable play or compose on an acoustic guitar. Or an oboe. Or modular synths. I suspect it's _possible_ to compose and play altrock or country music using live coding instead of a guitar - but why would you?
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