Livecoding is like gardening
I just came across this interesting article by Brian Eno. It struck me as quite a fair representation of what live coders do most of the time when they create—or perhaps I should say 'sculpt'—musical structures that evolve over time as part of their performance:
It's intuitive to think that anything complex has to be made by something more complex, but evolution theory says that complexity arises out of simplicity. That's a bottom-up picture. I like that idea as a compositional idea, that you can set in place certain conditions and let them grow. It makes composing more like gardening than architecture.
This metaphor perfectly captures the essence of live coding: rather than constructing a rigid, predetermined structure (architecture), live coders plant seeds of code and nurture them through iteration and experimentation (gardening). The performance becomes an organic process where simple rules and patterns evolve into complex, emergent musical behaviors.
The full article can be found at http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/oct05/articles/brianeno.htm.
Here is one of the songs from the album Eno is talking about in that article, Another Day on Earth.