Geek chic

To The Flea Pit in Shoreditch last night for the birthday party of London girl geek Candace Partridge. The beer was good, the geek talk intense, husband and Perlmonger Paul Mison is at last happy, having been headhunted to develop alternate reality games, and the music performed on laptops by a trio of programmers using SuperCollider.

I had heard of live coding, but this was my first encounter. A projector threw on the wall, not the ‘visualisations’ of iTunes or Windows Media, but the performers’ editing windows as they modified the code.

With my interest in domain-specific languages, I was fascinated. The performers controlled what we heard not with strings, stops or keyboards, nor with the graphical user interfaces made familiar by computers, but by writing and editing, in a language devised for the purpose. We watched and listened as the sounds and rhythms responded to the changing instructions on the wall. Now I want to see it done with music I like.