At meetups and jams and raves, people come up to me and ask how to do certain things in strudel. Like “how do I make it go—” and then they make some sounds with their mouth to show me what sounds they want to make.
I’ve got into the habit of showing them how to do it by typing / doing it yourself. Like, I guess they expect me to show them how to do it / make it happen on its own, in the sense that if you took your hands off the keyboard, it would keep going without you doing— without you.
But I like to show them that they don’t need to make it happen on its own. They can create those sounds by typing: Typing the changes you want in— live— uhh. You can delete and retype code live to do it in a manual way. If you can make a sound with your mouth you can most likely make it with your fingers too.
This is often a fun moment for me and for them because I think it conveys one of the core facets of live coding: That it can be live. And I see the glint in their eye as they start to “get it” more and their mind starts to open up to the things you can do.
“Oh wow I didn’t even think of doing something like that.”
“So you’re really using it like an INSTRUMENT.”
“Yes!”
When I was new to live coding I shared lots of little snippets of strudel code because I used it more like a way to make songs and sounds that play themselves, but looking back at that now, it felt really shallow or hollow or empty or something, because the shared snippet didn’t / couldn’t contain the process of typing that code: the PERFORMANCE.
Now that I’ve changed my outlook, I notice other newbies doing the same: Sharing snapshots but not the process, and it makes me sad because I very much like their snapshots and I feel a yearning to know them better: To see their process: To feel even more CONNECTION.
So… try it:
Don’t stop sharing the snapshot.
Do start sharing the process.
In this blog post, all words with three or more SYLLABLES have been CAPITALISED.
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