Abstract
This text presents a research progress about the relationship between artistic practice and technological development in the field of sound and computer music made with code. In this context, the materials of sound artists and computer musicians are the textual code and the sound generated or controlled by the code. The discussion is related to an apparent dissociation between artistic practice and technological development. To understand this relationship I start from the computer science’s concept of high and low programming levels. Based on this, I observe that artistic practice is usually centred in the high level while technological development points out to both levels. To study this relationship I designed a graph in which artistic practice and technological development have the categories of layers and are connected to the high and low levels by the source code. The access to lower levels makes it possible to understand the control structures that define modes of artistic production of the software, which implies somehow different discourses and questions. This is possible when the source code of software is open, but in order to understand the technological structures in lower levels, from an artistic perspective, a specialized knowledge is required.
Highlights
Computer music is made in many ways, one of them is by writing source code with programming languages, in this case, artistic creation and technological development find a common place in writing source code
This text articulates the concepts of source code, programming languages, openness, and high and low levels in order to try to understand the relationship between art and technology in the field of computer music creation made with source code from the perspective of the artistic practice
Programming languages and source code have a central role in this research as agents that make visible the relationship between technological development and artistic practice
Summary
Computer music is made in many ways, one of them is by writing source code with programming languages, in this case, artistic creation and technological development find a common place in writing source code. Computer art has the possibility to show the material, the processes and the ideas implicit in it, in this case, from the source code of the artistic pieces and technological objects, as in the case of the artistic practice of live coding, in which the process of programming sound, image or choreography is shown by projecting the code written during a performance to the audience (Lee 2019); another example are the programs that have their source code accessible in a repository This openness goes hand in hand with different technological knowledge, first, to use a software, and to modify it. Given the suggestion that open source programs allow access to musical and artistic creation, this question arises: How open is the open?
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