May 18, 2026 Winter 2026
What is live coding? This turns out to be a central question at the heart of the theory and practice of “live coding”, which has seen its subculture examine and question itself in recursive and self-constituting ways. This also emerged as one of the central questions of the Winter 2026 cohort of the Decoding Tendencies in Live Coding class at SFPC, where students read and thought critically about live coding and notation, and discussed this and reflected with the group. They also learned experientially through live coding themselves, embracing a more embodied way of understanding the temporal and performative dimensions of live coding.
Students engaged in live improvisational jams with Strudel and Hydra on flok.cc [alt text: a web browser shows flok.cc, a collaborative livecoding website, showing four sub-windows with Strudel code for music and Hydra code for the visuals shown in the background, with a black and white Voronoi noise pattern resembling tightly packed polygonal crystals; multiple cursors in different colors show where each collaborator is editing the code]Over 10 weekly sessions, and through multiple approaches, we investigated live coding as an emergent form of creative expression at the intersection of computation, performance, and notation. These approaches included presentations by the instructors Roxanne Harris and Eric Lee, as well as guest speakers Femi Shonuga-Fleming, Lita Vinueza, and Tyler McLaughlin. The 40 students, from diverse backgrounds across multiple locations around the world, engaged virtually in group discussions and written reflections, gathering and sharing multimedia materials on Are.na, as well as asking questions, discussing and sharing knowledge with each other on Discord.
Guest speaker Femi Shonuga-Fleming showed his practice including building cybernetic, generative music setups using orca live coding alongside detailed sound design in Ableton, as well as his wider practice involving architecture and instrument and sound system building [alt text: looped GIF showing a few seconds during Femi’s talk, shows a central window with orca code, white and grey text and symbols in a 2D grid, against black background, with seafoam green highlighting of some grid, and yellow highlighting showing text being copied, then pasted three times next to each other, and then played, with letters and numbers in the code changing each frame, generating randomized midi notes; the orca window sits against the digital audio workstation software Ableton, with grey panels showing software instruments with effects with dials and modulation envelopes and a convolution reverb impulse waveform]This thought work was joined by embodied, experiential learning, with students also engaging in live coding themselves through live improvisational jams on flok, during and outside of class sessions, as some people developed their own live coding practice. Some students were able to attend and even perform at livecoding shows and meetups happening during the 10 weeks, including livecode.nyc shows “UlgoraVe” and “SPLIT/SCREEN” at Wonderville in Brooklyn. Some students worked on developing final class projects, several of which were shown at the SFPC Decoding Tendences in Live Coding showcase in Bedstuy, Brooklyn in April.
Laura McKenzie performed a hybrid live code set with Strudel code, poetry, and video of knitted, felted slippers as puppets, thrown in the washing machine, livestreamed to the final showcase at a loft space in Brooklyn [alt text: looped GIF showing a few seconds, as a livestreamed video performance is projected onto the middle of a 40’ x 10’ sheet, in a Brooklyn loft space, with people in the audience watching, with a stack of speakers in a sound system in the background; the projected video shows white and red text which is Strudel code, superimposed on a video of two feet dancing, wearing red and white striped felt slippers, under blue jeans, on a beige wood floor]Live coding—simultaneously a process of notation and execution—offers a lens to explore the interplay and intersections between human expression and algorithmic systems. Against the backdrop of the wide-ranging impacts and social unease over Big Tech and AI, live coding invites questions and discussion about its role in art and poetic expression, as well as code and tech in social context. As a throughline from the themes that arose in the first iteration of the class, these included angles ranging from the meaning of “non-productive coding” to live coding’s embrace of imperfections, mistakes, and failure, as well as a window on the cognitive and temporal dynamics of programming languages and notational systems. We expanded our conceptions of what coding and notation could be, considering the ethnomathematical roots of coding in weaving, music, and dance.
Students explored a spectrum of notational systems and their implications across artistic, technical, and cultural domains. These systems include gestural, musical, scientific, spatial, choreographic, and computational notation. Again, students spent some time directly engaging with several prominent live coding languages, particularly Sonic Pi, Strudel, Hydra, and Orca, as well as on P5.js/P5LIVE and TouchDesigner, including focused workshops and demonstrations by instructors and guest speakers on these. The class reflected on the similarities and differences across these and other live coding languages, considering their terseness, readability, and optimization. How does language design and system architecture shape thinking and expression? What are the tendencies of themselves and other people as they engage with various live coding languages, and/or build their own tools? What are the various affordances of different tools and languages, and how do people react to these? How, in turn, are people shaped by this? How does this lead to further development of tools and languages? In this way, we considered how live coding appears to be continually redefining and reconstituting itself, as an experimental practice that embraces the pushing of its own boundaries of form and function, such as in the practices of glitching and circuit bending, and in embracing imperfection, liveness, mistakes, and crashes.
Extending the earlier exploration of the “cognitive dimensions” of notation, including multiple live coded implementations of “Clapping Music” by Steve Reich, we saw a range of assessments across students of various live coding languages, with consistency in some places, and diverging opinions in other places.
Radar charts showing students’ assessments of 14 “cognitive dimensions” of code and notation, for Strudel, Sonic Pi, Orca, and Bytebeats [alt text: four charts in four quadrants of the image; each quadrant focuses on one of four selected live coding languages: Strudel, Sonic Pi, Orca, and Bytebeats, with radar charts in each quadrant showing assessment scores from 0-10 for that language along 14 dimensions, Viscosity, Visibility, Premature Commitment, Hidden Dependencies, Rold-Expressiveness, Error-Proneness, Abstraction, Secondary Notation, Closeness of Mapping, Consistency, Diffuseness, Hard Mental Operations, Provisionality, Progressive Evaluation.]
Some of the themes explored include liveness vs. archiving; cybernetics and sound systems; building your own tools and political activism; how live code can help to challenge cultural conventions in melody, harmony, and rhythm in music; and building hybrid systems including the performative aspects of live performance:
Liveness vs. archiving
We considered the liveness of live coding, “thinking in public”, looking at live coding as a sociotechnical practice deeply embedded in spatiotemporal contexts, resonating with the movement to preserve live music that emphasizes the vitality of embodied performance. At the same time, we looked at its intersection with archiving and documentation, including some of the work from Roxanne Harris’s mid-residency show which included visual outputs generated from the actual live code written during live performances.
Instructor Roxanne Harris showed her mid-residency work, visualizing the data reflecting the typically unseen workings of how Sonic Pi live code during performance and ongoing execution [alt text: white lines against black background make geometric patterns resembling an unusual architectural structure with straight vertical and horizontal lines, and curves connecting various nodes, flanked on the left and right by white and red text showing code and execution data]
Cybernetics and sound systems
Guest lecturer Femi Shonuga-Fleming showed his practice with cybernetic systems involving generative melodies and rhythmic textures with orca live coding, combined with intricate sound design with music software, modular synths, and hand built instruments, electronics and sound systems.
Building your own tools, physical computing, and political engagement
Guest lecturer Lita Vinueza presented on her artistic and creative technology practice, including building Sonic Liberation Devices, drum machines and electronic music instruments that involve decolonial design alongside creative technology.
Guest lecturer Lita Vinueza talked about archiving her instrument-making practice as part of Sonic Liberation Devices, considering issues of accessibility, such as adding braille keys to the instrument, and exposing the many broader political choices in the whole design and building practice, from drum sample choices to PCB design and art in her Palestine Drum Liberator drum machine [alt text: screenshot from Lita’s presentation, a browser window shows Lita’s website, with three video thumbnail images in a row on the top, showing breadboarded circuits, some text, and an image showing representations of braille numbers for braille keys for a drum machine; the speaker and audience member video feeds are in a vertical stack on the right]
Guest lecturer R Tyler talked about live coding and its mathematical and cultural relationships to melody, harmony, rhythm, and ways in which it helps to move beyond cultural conventions. This included live coding implementations of microtonality, moving away from European classical music’s “equal temperament” tuning, as well as microtiming for generative grooves “off the grid”, to reincorporating the human element in timing and rhythm, including specific custom tools for doing this with Strudel.
Guest speaker R Tyler shows Strudel code and a pitchwheel chart showing microtonal chords in 31-EDO tuning [alt text: looped GIF of a few seconds from R Tyler’s video presentation, with browser window showing Strudel code in multiple colors, below which there is a “pitchwheel” representation of multiple notes in a chord, shown as lines radiating from the center of a circle, around which there are 12 points representing “equal temperament” tuning within an octave; the lines start in one radial position, then move to another, repeated twice, representing the pitch changes of the multiple notes in the chord; the speaker and audience member video feeds are in a vertical stack on the right]
Livecoding humans
Assistant instructor Eric Lee presented on his ongoing project on livecoding humans, by translating live coded algorithmic midi output to rendered scrolling scores, performed in real-time by human singers, and the poetic and politically expressive/critical potential of such live coded performances.
Instructor Eric Lee presented his cyborg choir project which explored what it would mean to “live code humans”, rendering live code generated MIDI into scrolling scores shown in four headsets worn by four singers, who would sight sing the algorithmic music live [alt text: three singers wear white VR headsets which cover their eyes; they are lit in blue light with deep shadows, in front of projected bluish-white lines depicting geometric visuals on the wall]
Students developed a wide range of hybrid live coding performances and installations, some of which were later shown at the final hybrid in-person/remote showcase in April, which featured 15 in-person and remote/pre-recorded performances and four interactive installations, and was streamed live on Twitch. Set in a Bedstuy loft space, people came and enjoyed the performances and interacted with the installations over six hours on Sunday April 12th.
Nehir Ay livestreamed to the final showcase, performing real-time with TouchDesigner, generating point clouds and instancing cubes and other 3D geometric shapes in blue and yellow, while sitting outside in Toronto against a green screen [alt text: Nehir, a woman with black hair, is wearing a large white jacket, sitting in a street, in front of generative visuals with blue and yellow cubes and the nodes and wires programming interface of TouchDesigner; the livestreamed video performance is being projected onto the middle of a 40’ x 10’ sheet, in a Brooklyn loft space, with people in the audience watching, with a stack of speakers in a sound system in the background]
Taylor Colimore created a series of work titled “ORCA x”, hybrid live code video loops, with orca code creating music, collaged with pixel art, accompanying video loops of animals; this one is “ORCA x Hyrax” [alt text: looped GIF of vertical video, showing a pink tinted background and image, the right half is a vertical pixel art generated from the shape of decorative loops on a wrought iron fence, the left half has orca code, text and symbols on a 2D grid, with letters being generated and moving rightwards, which trigger musical notes; below that on the bottom left is a video loop of a hyrax, a woodland animal, holding and eating some food]
Paul Hwang created an ambient orca live coding set incorporating poetry, and using orca’s southward ‘S’ operator, which moves one space down the 2D grid each frame, to create snow that triggers midi notes when hitting the ‘:’ play MIDI note operator [alt test: looped GIF of class video, showing letters and symbols in a 2D grid on a black background, animated, with white highlighted grid positions moving, and many ‘S’ letters moving vertically downwards, causing some strings of code beginning with the colon symbol to flash when they collide, which triggers MIDI notes; a vertical stack on the right shows the video call participants]
Woody Poulard presented an installation at the showcase, “Emergence Engine”, a networked audiovisual instrument for real-time generative performance, combining TouchDesigner, Hydra, ESP32 nodes, ORCA sequencing, and VST synthesis into a living system, enabling live-coded control over evolving sound and visuals, where patterns, feedback, and interaction give rise to complex, emergent behavior [alt text: a projector projects a screen on a white wall, with blue English and Japanese text in each of the four corners, over a 3D fragmented sphere visual looking like shards of blue-gree glass. In front of the wall is a white table, with a control screen showing TouchDesigner nodes and wires programming interface, and a black controller with buttons and a small screen. Some ESP32 sensor nodes are on the table too, with wires connecting them.]