Together in cyberspace

A recent musical practice that has emerged as a result of the twenty-first century’s rapidly developing technological landscape is live coding. This is the act of writing computer code for generating music in front of an audience while the performer projects their screen. As the number of live coders performing together increases, so too does the number of screens required to project all of the ensemble’s code. This well-documented problem is addressed in this chapter, which introduces a live coding editor built for collaborative improvisation and reflects on its impact on group creativity and ensemble interaction. The editor Troop displays all performer’s code in one window, simplifying technical setup, and shares inter-performer communication with audiences. This case study explores technological design parameters that allow live-coding composers to collaboratively compose music in real time and discuss what means of interaction and collaboration these afford.

God et al.— World-Making as Collaborative Improvisation: New Metaphors for Open Theists

The Abrahamic traditions regard God as the world’s author. But what kind of author? A novelist? A playwright? Perhaps a composer of classical music? I will argue that it is best to regard God as like an improvisational play director or the leader of a jazz ensemble. Each determines the broad melodic contours or coarse-grained plot beforehand, while allowing their musicians or actors, and chance, to fill in the more fine-grained details. This analogy allows us to regard God as the ultimate author of this world, while allowing us to be, while less than co-authors, more than mere enactors of a pre-written piece. These metaphors are particularly well-suited to illustrate and flesh out an Open Theistic view of things.

Play as a Player in Design. Rethinking a ‘Curious Practice’ for Co-designing Public Space

‘Move the Neighbourhood’ is a research project experimenting with co-designing playable installations for a public green space in Copenhagen through a design-based collaboration between children and design-researchers. We employed a co-design process to investigate whether deconstructing the rules for both play and design could trigger new ways of thinking about playable spaces. The aim was to test a participatory process in order to identify what might be meaningful in relation to both play and designing for play, along a spectrum ranging from rules to collaborative improvisation. Our fieldwork cultivated what Haraway calls ‘response-ability’ in a ‘curious practice’ that explores the unanticipated in the collaboration between children and designers. The metaphor of a ‘jelly cake’ from play-research was used to illustrate the messiness of play and to frame the discussion on collaborative design. We see play as a serious co-player that evokes collective worlds through productive, messy fields of action, and enables actors to engage in the co-design of playable public space. In this article, we investigate how play can create agency, spark imagination and open up practices in both artistic and academic processes. Drawing on Barad’s concept of ‘intra-action’, we investigate design/play as a dynamic engine for exploring collaborative design practices as a dialogue between art, play and co-design.

On-Site Participation for Proto-Architectural Assemblies Encompassing Technology and Human Improvisation: “Fish Trap” and “Orchid” Architectural Interventions

This research investigates the notion of builders’ on-site engagement to physically build architectural interventions based on their demands, spatial requirements, and collaborative improvisation enhanced with the principles of uniqueness and bespoke solutions which are previously explored in computational models. The paper compares and discusses two physical installations as proto-architectural assemblies testing two different designs and building approaches: the top-down predefined designers’ scenario contrary to bottom-up unpredictable improvisation. It encompasses a building strategy based on the discrete precut components assembled by builders themselves in situ. The paper evaluates both strategies in a qualitative observation and comparison defining advantages and limitations of the top-down design strategy in comparison with the decentralised bottom-up building system built by the builders themselves. As such, it outlines the position of a designer within the bottom-up building processes on-site. The paper argues that improvisation and builders’ direct engagement on-site lead to solutions that better reflect human needs and low-tech building principles incorporated can deliver unpredictable but convenient spatial scenarios.

Distributed cognition, ecological theory and group improvisation

This chapter proposes a way to understand the social, distributed and ecological underpinnings of improvised musical activity. It argues that significant aspects of collaborative performance may arise from perceptual, cognitive and action-orientated factors, in relation to prior experience and the broader historical and cultural context. The chapter illustrates ways in which each improviser in a collaboration may attune to different aspects of the circumstances, with idiosyncratic perceptions of the available affordances guided by attentional processes, physical aspects of the human body and musical instrument, and associations with prior experience. The experience of each musician in a collaborative improvisation thus both overlaps with and diverges from those of other musicians in the ensemble. These divergences are as important as the common ground, and are thus essential to any plausible and comprehensive account of collaborative improvisation.

Real-Time Music Notation in Mixed Laptop–Acoustic Ensembles

SGLC is a recent set of extensions to LOLC, a text-based environment for collaborative improvisation for laptop ensembles. SGLC integrates acoustic musicians into the LOLC environment: Laptop musicians author short commands to generate real-time notation, and acoustic musicians sight-read it in performance. We describe the background and motivations of the project, outline the design of LOLC and SGLC, explain the use of SGLC in a musical composition by one of the authors, and evaluate the impact of real-time notation on a concert performance with the environment.