Designing an Audio Live Coding Environment
Live coding is the practice of using code as a medium for visual or (in this case) musical expression and performance in real time. Code represents a uniquely flexible way of expressing musical structures and ideas, unconstrained by the fixed architectures of GUI-based tools such as DAWs.
Over the past year, I’ve been developing a new live coding environment called ohm. In doing so I’ve encountered a number of interesting design questions that I’ll discuss in this talk, such as:
- What live coding languages and audio programming DSLs exist, and what are their respective strengths and limitations, including the trade-offs between visual and textual programming
- How to design a domain-specific language (DSL) that describes audio graphs and musical structures in an expressive yet readable way
- How different programming paradigms—imperative, functional, declarative, and dataflow—and syntaxes map onto musical systems and structures
- The technical challenges of building an audio engine that supports arbitrary edits to its graph while supporting real-time, interruption-free playback
Corné Driesprong
Freelance Developer
Self-employed
I'm a polyglot (C/C++, Swift, JS, Rust) freelance software developer and musician with background in musicology and over a decade of experience across native, web and mobile application development. I'm currently particularly interested in (relatively) novel interfaces for musical expression, such as touch screens and live coding. When not programming, I can usually be found generating weird bleeps or playing drums in metal bands.