CMJ 2013 - Special Issue on Live Coding

Website toplap.org | Edit Freely

Category CMJ 2013

Deadline: January 21, 2013 | Date: January 21, 2013

Venue/Country: Online, Online

Updated: 2012-04-23 23:21:58 (GMT+9)

Call For Papers - CFP

Computer Music Journal, with a deadline of 21st January 2013, for

publication in Spring of the following year. The issue will be guest

edited by Alex McLean, Julian Rohrhuber and Nick Collins, and will

address themes surrounding live coding practice.

Live coding focuses on a computer musician’s relationship with their

computer. It includes programming a computer as an explicit onstage

act, as a musical prototyping tool with immediate feedback, and also

as a method of collaborative programming. Live coding’s tension

between immediacy and indirectness brings about a mediating role for

computer language within musical interaction. At the same time, it

implies the rewriting of algorithms, as descriptions which concern the

future; live coding may well be the missing link between composition

and improvisation. The proliferation of interpreted and just-in-time

compiled languages for music and the increasing computer literacy of

artists has made such programming interactions a new hotbed of musical

practice and theory. Many musicians have begun to design their own

particular representational extensions to existing general-purpose

languages, or even to design their own live coding languages from

scratch. They have also brought fresh energy to visual programming

language design, and new insights to interactive computation, pushing

at the boundaries through practice-based research. Live coding also

extends out beyond pure music and sound to the general digital arts,

including audiovisual systems, linked by shared abstractions.

2014 happens to be the ten-year anniversary of the live coding

organisation TOPLAP (toplap.org). However, we do not wish to restrict

the remit of the issue to this, and we encourage submissions across a

sweep of emerging practices in computer music performance, creation,

and theory. Live coding research is more broadly about grounding

computation at the verge of human experience, so that work from

computer system design to exposition of live coding concert work is

equally eligible.

Topic suggestions include, but are not limited by:

- Programming as a new form of musical exploration

- Embodiment and linguistic abstraction

- Symbology in music interaction

- Uniting liveness and abstraction in live music

- Bricolage programming in music composition

- Human-Computer Interaction study of live coding

- The psychology of computer music programming

- Measuring live coding and metrics for live performance

- The live coding audience, or live coding without audience

- Visual programming environments for music

- Alternative models of computation in music

- Representing time in interactive programming

- Representing and manipulating history in live performance

- Freedoms, constraints and affordances in live coding environments

Authors should follow all CMJ author guidelines

(http://www.mitpressjournals.org/page/sub/comj), paying particular

attention to the maximum length of 25 double-spaced pages.

Submissions should be received by 21st January 2013. All submissions

and queries should be addressed to Alex McLean

(alex.mcleanicsrim.org.uk).