Live Coding the Lineage

This paper presents a web-based system for exploring and performing with sounds discovered through Quality Diver- sity evolutionary algorithms. Our system renders interactive phylogenetic trees of evolutionary sound discovery processes, transforming genealogical relationships into a performable interface—the “Harpsitree”—using trajectory-based interac- tion and automatic code generation. The core concept we explore is “algorithmic sketching,” where trajectory-based discovery through evolutionary structures progressively for- malises into executable code, bridging visual exploration and textual live coding paradigms. This work contributes a novel performance interface as part of a larger research project in- vestigating evolutionary computation for sound discovery, demonstrating how phylogenetic structures can reveal com- positional affordances through appropriate interaction de- sign.