Introduction
What is live coding?
“Live Coding is a new direction in electronic music and video, and is getting somewhere interesting. Live Coders exposes and rewire the innards of software while it generates improvised music.” - toplap.org
- Interactive programming as an audio and/or visual art performance
- Using code to describe rules for an art piece
- Live notation/composition as performance
- Code can be changed and re-executed in real-time, while the program is running (compose music while performing)
- Takes computer language into a social environment, thus making coding to a social activity
Why using code?
- Classical music with notation on sheets is already a code to write musical pieces
- Pitch, duration, loudness in sheet music is a code, that can be read by musicians
- With Live coding, you can:
- Flexible describe rules
- Hack the code without an UI
- Interact with your composition, while it is playing
- Operate on the edge of liveness
What is Renardo?
- Renardo is a rebirth of FoxDot, after it has been depreciated. Big thanks to the developer Ryan Kirkbride from Leeds UK for his distribution to the live coding community!
- Renardo is a Python package that comes with its own IDE and a plugin for Pulsar called Pulsardo
- Renardo plays music by accessing any SynthDefs loaded onto a local SuperCollider server with some custom bits of syntax to boot
- SuperCollider is a programming language originally released in 1996 by James McCartney for real-time audio synthesis and algorithmic compositions, that runs underneath the Renardo environment
- Live coding with Python via Renardo offers accessible states through its reactive and dynamic objects
- Renardo focuses on musical patterns, not the digital signal processing (DSP), which is programmed by SuperCollider and controlled via OSC
- Renardo has a clean syntax, that is easy to read, so the code can be understood by an audience and traditional musicians without knowing Renardo or Programming