It was an accident!!
Sometimes I look back and try to figure out how I got here.
I vividly remember the day I decided to start making videos. I was at a cafe in a library. We were waiting there before a show.
It was a start. It wasn’t the start. It was a start. One of many moments that led to many things: A connection I can only see now. I couldn’t see it then. I didn’t have the hindsight I needed.
Time passed and I followed my nose. I followed my nose and some of the things that I made for fun took me to new places. Like cellpond that got me into academia and screenpond that got me my job.
In any case, it was an accident: A complete accident. I didn’t mean for those projects to lead to those rewards, but I’m thankful that they did.
And either way, I learned a lot. Not because I set out to. It wasn’t intentional, no. No, it naturally happened: Learning was a natural by-product of what I was already doing.
My explorations led me to making a tool called arroost. I wanted to combine / blend together a lot of the things that I had learned into one. I wanted to see what would happen. And what happened was:
I made a live coding tool by accident. I had no idea what live coding was, but I made a live coding tool (apparently).
I know this because some people from the— Hey I already wrote a blog post about this.
Despite starting out with silliness, I now take my work very seriously, whatever my work is. research? art? I don’t know what it is but anyway whatever it is i take it seriously
So when you— when I discover that I’ve accidentally made something, it is important for me to learn more about what that thing that you’ve— what I’ve made is.
“I’ve made a live coding tool, so I need to learn what that means.”
Obviously, the best way to learn is not by reading and studying and listening. No, the best way to learn is by doing.
So… for the past year or so, I have been trying to throw myself fully into the live coding world. I’ve been trying to participate fully, so that when it inevitably— with the hope that, when it becomes time to write or speak about arroost, I can be ready.
And, yes! I did manage to include some notes about live coding in my work: In the essay and the talk and the blog post.
But there’s always more I can do. I regret not being able to reference Laurie Spiegel but I haven’t engrossed myself enough in her stuff yet.
And work on arroost has only just begun. Similar to cellpond, I’ll keep returning to it over the course of several years in an attempt to learn more and more and more. Some things on purpose, some things by accident.
I started learning strudel, a music making tool by Felix Roos.
I worked my way through its (very good) guides and, on the same day, I livestreamed myself using it while embarrassing myself greatly.
I was quite amazed at how quickly you could make sounds that sound compelling. But I guess that’s the whole point. With strudel, you make music on the spot: You make it live.
That being said, in my first “performance”, I didn’t do much coding. I only turned on and off various lines of code that I had already written. I didn’t write any code on the spot. It was all pre-planned.
For sure, this is a valid form of live coding, and I’ve seen it done really well. But for me, it wasn’t a deliberate or artistic decision: It was because I had no other way of doing it. I wasn’t skilled enough to make something from scratch in front of everybody yet. Or at least, that’s what I thought at the time. There were too many emotional blockers getting in my way.
I did another livestream, with more strudel-ing, and again, it was all pre-prepared.
I really liked how it went, but it felt slightly incomplete to me, slightly unsatisfying.
I wanted to go further: To make music from scratch, on the spot, in the moment, straight from my head / heart, to the page(?) / screen.
You need to understand: This strudel thing was a—
I’ve always enjoyed improvisation, and I’m clearly into music and also code, so—
I practised and practised, strudel and strudel, day after day, making more and more music.
And I posted up many of the little tunes that I ended up making, on my mastodon and various other places.
I worked my way through different functions / different parts of the language, learning more and more, trying to cram it all in my head but mostly failing.
Whatever the case, it was really nice to be able to whip up a quick soundtrack for any little video I wanted to make. Of course, it’s also nice to use more polished tracks for certain videos, but for quick little tunes, strudel smashes it.
It was also really nice to be able to make my own background music whenever I wanted to focus.
I often listen to music when I’m writing because it helps me to focus / keeps my words in the right order. I have various playlists that I’ve grown over time / the years / that I can pick from to match my mood / current needs / to set the right— to fill the gaps in my head, to shut it up to the right extent so that I can block out any background thinking noise. I’m not listening to any music right now, and my writing has become— which is why my writing has become a mess / is a mess.
Yes, I have a good choice of music to pick from. I’m usually able to pick something helpful: Something calming when I need calming. Something loud when I need waking up.
But of course, I can only pick from what’s already out there. I can’t get it 100% right every time, because I only have a limited choice. Or sometimes, it takes too long to find the best choice.
So strudel is nice because I can make some highly personal and tailored music extremely quickly and then carry on writing. I even do it on my phone sometimes / on the train sometimes, like right now. I’m on my phone on the train and I have strudel playing / keeping me focused.
Anyway I kept learning and learning, reading up and picking up new techniques, and I kept up posting up strudels up on my feed.
I even went to a workshop led by Alex McLean to review the basics and to learn some new things too which I now use a lot in the sounds that I make.
The most important learnings were the little bits and pieces of music-making wisdom. Like when Alex showed us how it sounds interesting when you combine a very irregular beat with a very regular one, which may or may not seem already obvious to you, dear reader, but, hey, I learned a lot of music theory as a teenager, and it wasn’t obvious to me but maybe that’s because I was a very bad student.
Another snippet of wisdom I picked up was from the strudel docs. When making my way through strudel’s various functions, I came across jux which is short for “juxtapose” or something, I dunno.
“The jux function creates strange stereo effects, by applying a function to a pattern, but only in the right-hand channel.”
It basically means it puts a normal sound in your left ear and a modified sound in your right ear, and it works well with stereo speakers and especially well with headphones(!).
Anyway, the first example listed combines jux with rev, which is short for “reverse”. The reverse function just reverses your sounds, or at least, it reverses the pattern of your sounds. So if you’re playing the notes “A B C D”, it gets turned into “D C B A”.
Yes, combining these two together puts the normal sound in your left ear and the reversed sound in your right ear. It’s fun. It can create a slightly unusual, trippy effect, like the music is circling around you / like you’re inside the music.
It can lead to surprising results.
Adding jux(rev) to the end of your code might make your sounds sound terrible. Or it could make them sound amazing. Or it could kill your browser tab if it results in triggering too many noises.
I began to use jux(rev) a lot. So much so, that it became a crutch for me. Whenever I wanted to roll the dice to try to make my music sound more interesting, I just slapped a jux(rev) on the end. And I posted this confession up on the internet.
And guess who showed up again… None other than Alex McLean, telling me that “.jux(press) or .jux(iter(4)) can also work.”
And I had no idea what those two functions did at that time, and I still don’t really know. Well, I don’t think I could explain what they do in words, but I feel like I do have an intuitive sense of what they do, if you know what I mean?
Anyway, thanks to Alex, I gained two more crutches, jux(press) and jux(iter(n)). They’re fun.
The first time I used them, I wrote a little “thanks yaxu” comment inside my code, as a little nod / credit / thanks to Alex, who performs under the name “yaxu”.
Another piece of wisdom I started to realise was—
You see, when you make music in strudel, you can end up with—
I kept posting up individual links to snapshots of little strudel sessions but they never quite—
I realised one important thing / skill behind strudeling is to not only add code / new code, but to also delete / remove old code. Music is not just about noise, it is also about the absence of noise. And again, this might seem very obvious to you, dear reader, but for me, I— I had to learn it the hard way.
But just knowing this truth is not enough, because:
Deleting is hard! Deleting is hard because you tend to get attached / emotionally attached to the sounds that you make. They feel familiar, and known, and you’re proud of them. You don’t want to let them go.
And occasionally, there’s a voice in the back of your head, questioning your skills.
“If you get rid of this code, you may never be able to make anything this good, ever again.”
Yes, deleting code / letting code die takes a bit of boldness, I think. But the natural growth and death of different noises and sounds and—
My friend V Buckenham puts it better than me:
“there is really something to the way that strudel/tidal is not about working your way to some completed musical structure, but about building and demolishing structure over time.”
So anyway, I tried to face my emotional blockers by getting better at deleting code, ending up with very little at all.
My shared strudels were only tiny snapshots of larger sessions, because each session involved so much change, that one single link couldn’t possibly contain—
The snapshot is just the tiny artifact at the end. The real art is in the process.
A month or so ago, I went to Berlin to give a talk at causal islands. And in that talk, I showed the tiniest tiniest bit of strudel. It was basically nothing. It was a sliver.
Even so, some people asked me to show strudel to them afterwards. So we all ended up going back to my hotel room (quite late) and I introduced some people to strudel. Like, “here’s what it is” and” here’s how it works” and “here’s how to make some sounds in it” and stuff.
I tried to break down the different kinds of patterns you can make in strudel and it was pretty boring to be honest. I just did a lot of talking and I don’t think they learned anything or appreciated it much.
Then, just as they were about to leave, my good friend Orion Reed turned up, having been at some Berlin club for most of the night. And he said, “Are you live coding?” or something like that, before promptly dumping down his bag and whipping out his laptop.
I don’t know what that tool was, that he opened up, but he opened up some other live coding tool, and we began making music together. So those other guests decided to stay a little bit longer.
And hey, neither of us knew what we were doing. Orion had to remind himself how that tool worked, and both of us had to figure out very quickly how to make two different laptops using two different tools work together, and—
I really appreciate having a friend like Orion who is mad and bold enough to decide to say yes to almost everything, and just “go for it”. He’s one of the most likeable people I know and I miss him now that he’s left London. But on the other hand, I don’t think there’s a single city in the world that deserves to keep hold of Orion. At least, not yet. That maniac belongs to the sky— I mean, he even tried to get us to all go sky diving back in Los Angeles a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, I don’t think he got a bite.
That feels like a good spot to pause for now. This essay about pastagang will be continued in Part three: Flok.
Back to da fwed.