Cortland Mahoney

Livecoding

Performances

As a livecoder, I have performed at algoraves both as a musician and, more recently, as a visualist. I have used TidalCycles, SuperCollider, Hydra, and Strudel in my performances.

Hosted Algoraves

Here are some algoraves that I hosted:

Documentation

Here are two documents I wrote that were presented at livecode workshops:

how-to-make-a-synthesizer
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Artistic Infinity Mirrors with Hydra
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Community Building

With LivecodeNYC, I helped dozens of artists get their first experience performing livecoding. I empowered people to express themselves through handwritten technology.

With Data Dancers, I built the community from scratch. There was no livecoding group in Atlanta before I arrived, and now we have a core group of six members/contributors and a dozen peripheral attendees.

Roxanne Harris presenting on Sonic Pi
Roxanne Harris presenting on Sonic Pi
Dave Stein presenting on FoxDot
Dave Stein presenting on FoxDot
Flyer for Open Cables
Flyer for Open Cables
Flyer for Process Power
Flyer for Process Power
Flyer for Algogayze
Flyer for Algogayze

Personal Reflections

Livecoding blurs the lines between art and technology. It offers software developers a new way to express themselves and helps artists reshape their understanding of music and art. And it’s so fun!

Technical Insights (Opinions)

  • TidalCycles: My favorite for making fun music, with a great high-level API for patterning music, sound, and effects parameters. Most of my “good” livecode music sets are with TidalCycles.

  • SuperCollider: Offers more manual control but can be harder to use in real-time for variety. A simple comparison is that TidalCycles is like JavaScript, while SuperCollider is like C.

  • Hydra: Recently my tool of choice, especially since most Data Dancers prefer musical tools. It helps me think about transformations over space and time in new ways.

  • Strudel: A tool I know just enough about to teach to others. It shares a pattern syntax with TidalCycles but runs in the browser, making it more accessible without needing to install Haskell, SuperCollider, and an IDE.