Estuary 0.3: Collaborative audio-visual live coding with a multilingual browser-based platform

Estuary is a browser-based platform for live coding that allows a heterogeneous collection of live coding languages to be used together in collaborative “ensembles”. This paper begins with a broad outline of the history of Estuary’s development, including discussion of the philosophies and accountabilities that guide that development. We then present two of the main directions in which work on Estuary has been concentrated in recent years: (1) towards supporting audiovisual live coding (and not merely musical live coding) through the development and inclusion of languages focused on visual results (in close connection with musical concepts), and (2) towards supporting diverse use cases by evolving into a modular “sandbox” where live coding languages, widgets (including some focused on intra-ensemble communication), and media resources are brought together “on-the-fly" in flexible ways. Reflections on specific applications of Estuary in different contexts are interspersed throughout, with a penultimate section focusing on some further applications, largely in educational settings. The paper concludes with brief remarks about directions for future work.