Behind The Screens: Earth to Abigail
An interview with Mynah Marie, also known as Earth to Abigail.
Mynah Marie is a singer, accordionist, and live coder who performs under the name Earth to Abigail. In this interview, we’d like to talk about their practices and tools, as well as work in the community and their upcoming activities.
What is live coding and what does it mean to you? How has it influenced your practice of making and thinking about art?
Live coding is a relatively new artform that uses a programming language to generate music or visuals in real-time. One of the purposes of live coding, and also what makes it so different from using any other kind of software to create digital music or art, is that the code is meant to be seen by the audience as the live coder develops it.
I think that for a lot of people who are less tech-savvy, programming is this weird thing that is kind of impenetrable. People know the software they’re using is created by programmers and engineers, but they have no idea of what this actually looks like under the hood. Live coding gives us the opportunity to open that black box to an audience by showing what the code looks like, and to do that through a medium people can easily understand and relate to: music or visual art.
That’s probably one of the main points that made live coding so interesting for me at the beginning. I always believed live coding could help us bridge a gap in society between people who build software and people who use it. I think we could improve our relationship to technology in general as a society if there was a better overall understanding of how software is built and the better ways to use it.
Could you tell us what your first encounter with live coding was and what are your sources of inspiration?
I discovered programming pretty late. I’ve always been a musician since as long as I can remember and that was my first and only career until I discovered my passion for technology about 5–6 years ago. It happened at a moment where I was at a crossroads in my career. I was recovering from a burnout after living for 3 years in Mumbai and working as a stage and session musician for many big Bollywood artists at the time. I had many great experiences, but the studio and touring schedules were very extreme and it basically got me to the burnout point.
Also, working for so many different artists made me realize that what I really wanted to do was to be a solo performer. I wanted to create my own music, instead of constantly playing other people’s music. So while I was recovering from my burnout in my family home in Portugal, I started working on new songs.
At first, the only thing I knew is that I couldn’t afford to play with a band. So I decided to find ways to build a solo project I’d be satisfied with. I was looking for ways to go beyond the singer/songwriter style so I thought of starting to integrate some technological elements in my setup.
The first thing I bought was a loop station, and it was a complete turning point. It might sound strange, but playing with this loop station was the first time I ever tried to make music with something else than my voice or an instrument. It opened up so many questions in my mind… How did a loop station really work? How do people create this kind of tool? This led me to ask myself: how does a computer work?
I started to randomly google stuff and found a link to an introductory programming course. Out of sheer curiosity, I checked it out, and after just the first few minutes of lecture, I was hooked. I became completely obsessed with learning everything I could about programming, it was literally the only thing I’d do all day, every day, for months.
After some time, I asked myself if there was anything I could do related to music using programming. One day, I just randomly searched on google something like “how to make music with programming”. I really didn’t think I would find anything… But then, the first thing that popped up in the search results was the link to the Sonic Pi website. And that was it. I checked it out, listened to Sam Aaron’s first Ted Talk and I just knew this would be a central part of my artistic practice from now on.
Soon after that, I started composing music using Sonic Pi and released my first video as Earth to Abigail.
Do you have any preferred platforms and/or languages, how did you come to use them and do you have a specific reason for it?
Sonic Pi is my all time favorite, not only because it’s the platform that introduced me to live coding, but also because of the flexibility and power of the language itself.
I like the fact that Sonic Pi is built on a language like Ruby, which is very close to the English language in many ways. I’m very fascinated by the idea of “code poetry” where the way the code is written doesn’t only have a functional purpose, but also an expressive one. I love the idea of communicating ideas, concepts, even emotions, not only through the music my code generates, but also through the code itself in the way it’s written.
A lot of live coding languages are built in a way that makes them more opaque, great for functionality and efficiency, but not so great in terms of really communicating something through the language of the code itself. Sonic Pi gives me a lot of freedom on that level, which is something I love about it.
More recently, I also started to really get into SuperCollider, for very different reasons. I’m really loving the sound synthesis capabilities SuperCollider gives me, and I love learning more about the engine that powers most of other live coding frameworks under the hood.
Are there any platforms, tools, libraries or other extensions you have developed yourself and if so can you elaborate on why and for what purpose?
No, I can’t say I’ve developed anything myself. The closest project I did to developing my own library was an exploration of sorting algorithms I did a few years ago. I created what I called an “algorithmic toolbox” based on four basic sorting algorithms in the form of functions that can be used and customized to suit any kind of live coding performance.
My goal with this was to explore how algorithms with a similar purpose — in this case, sorting a list — could create a different sonic result due to their deviation in process. I wanted to see what each of these algorithms “sounded” like, even though their end goal was fundamentally the same. Then, I explored creating functions acting like audio plugins using each of these algorithms, where basically you can provide each function with enough arguments to create a multitude of different sonic results while keeping the essence of the sound of each algorithm, the same way you’d use some kind of effect on a track.
Are you part of a (local) community? How do you organize and do you share works or collaborate often?
In 2019, while living in Israel, I did my best to spread the word about live coding there and started a small TOPLAP node, TOPLAP Israel. We were very few people at first, and plans kind of got disrupted a lot because of the pandemic. Still, in collaboration with the TAMI hackerspace in Tel Aviv, we managed to have a small group of dedicated people attending live coding workshops every 2 weeks.
I had to leave Israel mid 2021, but the group is still going strong and meetups are still happening in TAMI, which is something I’m very proud of. Now, I’m living in Portugal again and who knows, I might start another live coding group here.
In what forms are algorithms and randomness applied in your practice or performance? Do you try to pursue serendipity and how or why not?
This really depends on the kind of performance I’m putting together. It depends on the audience, how long I’m performing, and what I’m trying to communicate. In general, if I’m performing for an audience familiar with live coding, I’ll take more risks, prepare less, and rely a lot more on spontaneous improvisation. That’s because I feel safe when performing in the live coding community, since it’s such a welcoming and non-judgmental environment in general.
If I’m performing for an audience of developers or engineers, but not necessarily live coders, I’ll do my best to create my performance around an algorithmic concept that is interesting. I’ll try to find something that programmers can easily relate to and recognize within the code itself, but do something unusual with that.
Then, if I’m performing for a wider audience, I tend to focus a lot more on the musical result itself, without worrying too much about what I need to do to get there. I’ll also most likely integrate instruments or vocals as well, because that’s something people can more easily relate to.
And in terms of using randomness, well, I use randomness all the time! I think the ability to use randomness is an important part of what makes live coding such a dynamic exchange between live coder and machine.
In the context of improvising, randomness is interesting to me because it allows me to be surprised by what the computer does, which, in a way, emulates the feeling we can have when jamming with another musician.
In the context of a more prepared performance, it’s a bit different because even though I use functions generating “randomness”, I already know what the result of this randomness will be. So it becomes about being able to communicate a process to my machine and let it do its thing, rather than having to manually hardcode every single value.
In a way, it’s about relinquishing control, similar to what a conductor does with an orchestra — indicating to the musicians how to play something, without being the one playing it themselves. I love that feeling of thinking about the music on a higher level and letting my computer figure out the execution side of it.
Do you have any recommendations for people who have not gotten into live/creative coding but are curious to give it a try?
Pretty much the first thing I try to communicate to people that are attending one of my live coding workshops for the first time is to not focus too much on the end result.
A lot of people try to approach live coding with an idea they have in mind, and they try to write the code in a way that can execute that idea. I don’t believe this is the right approach when starting out. So I always recommend to instead focus on the process, and to let the result of that process surprise you.
Could you share a sneak-peek into an upcoming project or something you are currently working on and very excited about?
There are quite a few exciting things coming up in the next 6 months! I’m working on new music that should be released within the next month or two. I’m also working on a bigger scale project called FRAGMENTS that will be an exploration through voice and live coding of the complexity in navigating gender identity. I’m hoping to have a performance ready by this summer, and hopefully have a small tour in the UK with it.
Is there anything we did not ask about but you would really like to share with the readers?
If you’re interested to keep in touch with me and know more about my work, or if you’d like to get a heads up when I’m giving workshops or performances, the best way to do that is either by subscribing to my mailing list, or by following me on BitClout.
Also, if you’d like to listen to some of my music, I’m on Spotify.
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This article is part of the Behind The Screens series of Creative Coding Utrecht — a series of events where digital artists and live coders create a piece in ten minutes.
Watch Season 1 // Watch season 2 // More interviews
The Behind The Screens series is suppported by Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industries and Gemeente Utrecht.
