The Liveness of Live Coding: A Musical Perspective on the Many Livenesses

Paper i proceeding, 2025

What is the liveness of live coding and why should we care about it? In this article I discuss how we came to use the term in live coding and how the term is framed across different research areas and artistic practices. This discussion forefronts some tensions but also shared understandings. I provide an interpretation of liveness in the context of musical live coding and discuss how it converses with the many interpretations of the liveness(-es). A shared understanding emerges among electronic musicians about the different qualities of liveness that extends beyond the technical aspects of it.