ALG0MA5
Live coding and innovative instruments at Gaudeamus
The ALG0MA5 concert was part of the Gaudeamus Festival program in 2021. A collaboration between Gaudeamus, Creative Coding Utrecht, the On The Fly project, and NL_CL. The festival brought together a diverse range of performances involving live coding, innovative instruments, and audience interaction. The event took place at De Nijverheid in Utrecht and was divided into two stages. The acts involving visual projection happened inside the building while the remaining ones happened on a stage outside, with the audience moving between locations during concert breaks.
The first set of performances happened inside. Iván Paz live coded Supercollider, and Rafaele Andrade and Sabrina Verhage performed their piece “This Isn’t Solo”. Iván superposed fast glitchy beats with a long brass sounding pad chord that had shifting harmonic content, volume swells, and internal rhythmic activity. The next piece involved audience interaction. Sabrina sat on the computer and Rafaele played her innovative instrument, Knurl, a reprogrammable hybrid cello with 16 strings. The audience could trigger synthesized plucked string sounds by accessing a website and playing with its user interface. The evolving density of the synthesized sounds conveyed what was happening in the room. It increased initially with more and more people figuring out how to get to the website by scanning the QR code, which led to a peak of excitement when everyone was mashing their phone screens and then to a gradual decrease in energy as people’s engagement with the website waned. The visuals on the projected screen and our phones then changed. We had a different mode of interaction, we were now throwing 2D shapes across what seemed like cello strings. The connection between what we were doing on the web application and resulting sound was less immediate than the previous section. Nevertheless, this led to renewed engagement from the audience.
After a short break where we walked to the outdoor stage, we had a performance by Jonathan Reus on banjo and Rafaele on Knurl. It was a silent concert with attendees wearing headphones. An unplanned clash with a brass band playing outdoors gave the performance a hint of a John Cage or Charles Ives aesthetic. Their piece was primarily quiet, with long cello sounds from the Knurl and sparse chords from the banjo layered with sampled singing sounds and dense grain clouds.
Blaž Pavlica was live coding indoors, so we made our way back inside. He relied heavily on sound spatialization using the four speakers surrounding us, so he sat closer to the audience than the previous performers and with his back towards us. The position gave him a better understanding of what someone would hear in the middle of the hall. His output had a clear narrative. Starting from clouds of short grains, he combined them with longer continuous sounds full of glissandi. After exploring that counterpoint, the longer sounds became the only element at the forefront and gradually grew more chaotic and infused with effects. The spatialization of the grains and making the longer sounds move throughout the room were very effective and made the whole performance more engaging.
We walked outside to what was the last set of the day. Anne Veinberg on the piano, Felipe Ignacio Noriega live coding, and Rafaele Andrade playing Knurl. It had started with a touch of comedy, with Felipe communicating with the audience and fellow performers through synthesized speech. Anne joined with dissonant chords at a tranquil pace that eventually turned into arpeggios. She followed with an ostinato at the high register superposed with playful bass lines and ended with a pointillistic dissonant texture. In parallel, we mainly had longer cello sounds from Rafaele and an increased use of effects and synthesized sounds from both Rafaele and Felipe. Anne and Felipe then left the stage, while Rafaele stayed behind for the last act. She improvised over Brazilian rhythms alternating between longer sounds and more vigorous, almost percussive sections.
It was a long and diverse program, so I appreciated the breaks to move between stages and put the pieces in context before the next set started. The audience was exposed to Knurl in multiple settings with live coding, traditional instruments, and even interacted with it in a live performance. Live coding was also presented in more than one format: both in its most stereotypical form with the code projected on the screen and as part of an ensemble with other instruments. Overall, thanks to the collaborations with CCU, NL_CL, and the On The Fly project, the Gaudeamus audience got to see this variety of digitally innovative music made by musicians that are not only composing and performing but also building their instruments and writing their computer programs.
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on-the-fly is a project to promote Live Coding practice, a performative technique focused on writing algorithms in real-time so that the one who writes is part of the algorithm. Live coding is mainly used to produce music or images but it extends beyond that. Our objectives are: supporting knowledge exchange between communities, engaging with critical reflections, promoting free and open-source tools, and approaching live coding to new audiences. The project runs from 10/2020 to 09/2022, is co-founded by the Creative Europe program, and is led by Hangar in collaboration with ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Ljudmila, and Creative Coding Utrecht.
