From seemingly all around the classroom at District Arts and Education on Tuesday evening came a series of meandering tones, a series of chirps and clicks. The sounds were coming from an open-source live-coding program called Estuary, and they were the result of musician Carl Testa feeding it a couple simple commands. He was about to demonstrate how people could use the program to make music together by coding in real time.
The demonstration opened up possibilities for gaining confidence in learning how to code. It also suggested compelling questions about what music composition is when the software makes some of the decisions.
Testa is teaching a series of workshops on audiovisual live coding at the New Haven Free Public Library through April (the next one is this Friday, Nov. 12), thanks in part to an Artists Respond grant administered through the Connecticut Office of the Arts and the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development. He has taught a similar class at Educational Center for the Arts (ECA), where he’s a teacher, and he’s hoping to do more classes at District as well. Tuesday’s event marked an auspicious start, and proof of concept.
Testa has been an integral part of New Haven’s experimental music scene for over 15 years, working with Anthony Braxton and Firehouse 12 and guiding the Uncertainty Music Series for a decade. An upright bass player, he’s been “live coding since 2008, but not extensively.” At first, it was “just with the instrument being processed by the computer.” He has explored that in the context of ensemble playing for years.
He dived deeper at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when it became a way to continue to make satisfying music remotely with other musicians when all other avenues were closed, and a way to structure music classes at ECA when students couldn’t meet in person. He saw then that online live coding platforms “have gotten even further along than I thought.” Using these platforms, musicians could collaborate in the same virtual space. And many of them — like Estuary — are open source, meaning that one can use them for free, and that it has a community of users built around it.
“With these workshops, I’m trying to let people know about it, give them guidance on how to get started, and then you can roll with it from there,” Testa said.
On Tuesday night, Testa was able to get participants who had never used the platform before (including this reporter) to make music together. He embedded in each desktop’s window a helpful tutorial — Testa called it a “cheat sheet” — to acquaint participants with Estuary’s coding language and the parameters involved. We could use a series of commands to create melodic figures and rhythmic patterns from a variety of sounds. It didn’t take long for everyone to get the hang of it. Within a half hour, we had all constructed some basic beats and repeating melodies. That’s when Testa let us loose.
“Let’s just experiment, creating different combinations,” he said.
That turned out to be an important instruction. Coding is so often presented in classes and in popular culture as a tightrope exercise in proofreading; every command must be phrased just so, with the penalty for failure a rising plume of smoke from the keyboard. Testa was offering a more exploratory way into coding. Sure, the syntax of the commands had to be right, or the program wouldn’t know what we were trying to tell it to do. But the parameters, in the case of Estuary, could be toyed with. We could tweak and tweak again without being entirely sure what the musical result would be, and the shifts in patterns and textures became what created the music. With five participants, each coding in real time, we could anticipate how the music might change. And because each of us could see the code we were using to create our musical motifs, we were learning from one another as we went as well.
When Testa heard that we were getting comfortable with a certain set of commands, he gave us new codes to play with, new ideas to consider. “We’re starting to get somewhere here,” he said. “I can already hear music coming. I hear melodic and rhythmic elements.”
Most intriguing from a conceptual point of view were a few commands that left certain note choices, or timing choices, up to the program. Traditional ideas about music composition involve a person writing down their intentions note for note. Improvisation implies making spontaneous decisions. Could the program be said to be improvising? Or was it just a compositional tool involving a certain degree of freedom? In either case, the pleasure lay in hearing how those melodic ideas unfolded, and hearing how fellow participants altered their codes in response to continue to develop the music we were making.
Testa next introduced us to a live coding visual program called Hydra, developed by artist Olivia Jack. She had created Hydra for her own artistic practice, Testa explained, but in time made it open-source so anyone could use it. Hydra’s parameters allowed the programmer to make flowing images from rigorously geometric to amorphously chaotic, from monochromatic to wildly colorful, from static to strobing. Hydra could be made part of the workflow within Estuary as well, meaning people could take turns coding and changing the images in Hydra while developing a piece of music.
Within two hours we were able to create something pleasing to us as a team. The process of live coding turned out to be deeply collaborative, and democratic. Testa pushed that idea further. “If you’re doing a performance,” he said, “you can project the screen so the audience can see what you’re coding.” That way, “you can invite the audience into the process.”
As we continued to tinker, Testa added, “I hope to get more people into this. We could do performances. There are a lot of possibilities.”
“I could play with this all night now,” one participant said.
Carl Testa’s next live coding workshop takes place on Friday, Nov. 12 at the Ives Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library. Visit the NHFPL’s website for details. Testa will be offering live coding workshops regularly through at least April.