Comment by RossBencina

Live coding music/visuals/art has been a fairly major subculture for over 15 years: https://blog.toplap.org/ Prior to that there was plenty of live/interactive code-based music going on within the computer music scene, HMSL (FORTH based)[1] and CLM (Lisp based)[2] come to mind.

Real-time sound synthesis was tough to live-code, or to run in real-time at all, prior to the faster personal computers of the early 90s. (The tracker scene obviously pre-dates this, but in that case the actual sound synthesis algorithms weren't live coded.) In fact, code-to-music dates back to 1951[3], or 1957[4], depending on your definitions. There is a large history of development by many computer musicians following on from Max Matthews' MUSIC-N. The Computer Music Tutorial[5] is a good source for the academic/research institutions/serious composers part of the picture.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_Music_Specificati...

[2] https://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/clm/

[3] https://cis.unimelb.edu.au/about/history/csirac/music

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSIC-N

[5] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262044912/the-computer-music-tu...