Editorial: Live Coding Sonic Creativities

Live coding has evolved considerably since its emergence in the early 2000s, as presented in the seminal 2003 Organised Sound (8/3) article ‘Live Coding in Laptop Performance’ by Collins, McLean, Rohrhuber and Ward. Differentiating itself from early laptop music and other computer music, it is a performance practice that promotes the sharing of the musical process with the audience, emphasising the code itself as a form of musical notation. Live coding has been adopted into various fields of art, but as musical algorithmic thinking, it has been explored and developed by many practitioners and collectives across the world up to the present and there is a broad range of divergent practices within the field. We are therefore thrilled to present the special issue ‘Live Coding Sonic Creativities’, which is the first special issue on live coding in Organised Sound. This has been a long journey of almost two years of work. The core research question of this special issue concerns the idiosyncratic sonic creativities that emerge from the practice of live coding and what new sonic material live coding has enabled. The collection of articles is genuinely diverse in terms of themes including new theories and philosophies on live coding, diversity and inclusion and contemporary sociocultural processes embodied by different communities of practice. The articles represent a breadth in musical genres, approaches to live coding, interdisciplinary practice related to sound-based creativity, innovative sound and music composition, and new paradigms and environments that enable new ways of thinking and working with sound, as well as speculative futures and new imaginaries of live coding.