Alex McLean

Making music with text

Category Archives: livecoding

Things coming up

by Alex on May 3, 2013

I’m having a bit of a breather at the moment, but here’s some of the things I am up to over the Summer: 16th May 2013 Another Algorave on the MS Stubnitz. The last one was masses of fun, and really looking forward to seeing what the next one turns up.. May 27-30 2013 I won’t [...]

Transient and ephemeral code

by Alex on March 4, 2013

Be sure to read the comments – Sam Aaron makes some important corrective points… The below left as documentation of thinking-in-progress. There is now an exciting resurgence of interest in live programming languages within certain parts of the software engineering and programming language theory community. In general the concerns of liveness from “programming experience design” and [...]

Demonstrating tidal

by Alex on March 2, 2013

After posting at length about the history of my musical pattern representation, I thought I’d better show some demos and explain a bit about how it works in practice. Demonstrating music tech is difficult, because it seems to be impossible to listen to demos without making aesthetic judgements. The below is not meant to be [...]

Haskell patterns ad nauseam

by Alex on February 28, 2013

TL;DR I’m now describing algorave music as functions from time ranges to lists of events, with arbitrary time precision, where you can query continuously varying patterns for more detail by specifying narrower time ranges. For more practical demo-based description of my current system see this post. I’ve been restructuring and rewriting my Haskell pattern library [...]

Happy new year + upcoming

by Alex on December 27, 2012

Looking forward to 2013, some things I’m up to so far: 15th Feb: talk and solo performance at the Node symposium, Frankfurt Late Feb (date tbc): slub at the Bartlett nexus, London 22-24th Feb: slub at the network music festival, Birmingham 5th March: Talk at the Leeds Psychogeography Group – my sister is doing this one now! 14-15th March (tbc): Talk + [...]

Lurk recordings

by Alex on December 12, 2012

I’ve been recording some experiments with a new iteration of my livecoding system, and putting them up over on lurk.org. I’m going to continue doing that but here’s the latest recording for the tired of clicking: All and any feedback is very welcome.

Busy week

by Alex on November 21, 2012

That was fun.. First, full slub (Dave, Ade and I) at the Mozilla party. The most interested crowd we’ve had, it was hard to get any live coding done between all the questions!  Dave collected some photos from the many that appeared online.. Then to Mexico City for the week-long /* vivo */ live coding festival. [...]

Upcoming events and things

by Alex on June 15, 2012

Fresh back from holiday, with a lot of things coming up: Thursday 21st June, Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge Live coding at the opening of the Poetry, Language, Code exhibition http://visualisecambridge.org/?p=262 Friday 22nd June, BEAM Festival, Brunel University, Uxbridge Talking about live coding during the day and performing in the evening http://www.beamfestival.com/  Friday 29th June, InterFace2012, Birmingham [...]