How Live is Live Coding? The case of Tidal's Longest Night.

From the 21st to the 23rd of December 2021, more than one hundred live coders from the TidalCycles community and beyond coordinated to produce non-stop algorithmic audiovisual performances broadcasted openly on streaming platforms. For the analyst or software designer, this event represents an extraordinary opportunity in that it allows to study a wide and diverse range of performers incorporating live coding techniques in their work from around the world. In this article, we present a discussion about the particular liveness of live coding based on our observations of these performances. We focus on code editing practices and on the general approach to the medium – the text editor and the source code – to better understand how live coders from the event approached the performing act and how they designed live performances through the mediation of code. More specifically, this article explores the reasons that could explain why, despite the fact that live coding libraries such as TidalCycles are built to encourage free improvisation and free exploration of musical patterns, the majority of live coders do not start their performance from scratch.