CodeBank: Exploring public and private working environments in collaborative live coding performance

This paper introduces the collaborative live coding platform CodeBank, which utilises public and private working within musical performance over a network. CodeBank allows live coders to create polished live performances of improvised and experimental music using the live coding environment, FoxDot. The system is split into two applications; client and server. The server application generates audio for the audience while performers use the client to listen to, and experiment with, a local version synchronised with the server through headphones. Taking inspiration from collaborative software development tools, which provide version control, such as Git and Mercurial, performances in CodeBank involve ‘pulling’ codelets from the server-side central repository to listen to changes before ‘pushing’ the snippet back to the server.