• MEET THE FEMALE CODERS PUSHING ELECTRONIC MUSIC INTO THE FUTURE
    http://mixmag.net/feature/female-coders-algorave

    Earlier this summer, I was given the pleasure of attending a female-focused live coding workshop at No Bounds festival in Sheffield. A small group of women sat on laptops in a stripped-back, whitewashed room on the top floor of Trafalgar Warehouse. Dorien Schampaert and Lucy Cheesman began the session with a classic installation party, guiding us with fairly simple instructions on how to run coding software Supercollider and Ixi Lang on our systems.

    As a woman who has never attempted coding before, the language was all pretty alien to myself and others around me. This language barrier was quickly broken by Dorien, a music teacher at the University of Leeds, as she explained how she first got into the Algorave scene in a similar beginners coding workshop. The emphasis on the workshop as female-orientated was a reminder that as a girl, throughout my school years I was hardly encouraged to choose I.C.T as an option or career pathway, and I still recall how these classes strangely manifested as “male” rather than “female” subjects.

    The Algorave scene is a progressive movement that places emphasis on live improvisation and spontaneous electronic sounds. I’ve attended many live electronic performances that have left me in awe of the artist surrounded by intimidating synthersiser setups, but there is something endearing about the minimalism of live coding. Samples and songs can be made by simple codes that the artist writes into their coding provider of choice. There are numerous coding languages that can be learnt: Python, TidalCycles, Supercollier and Ixi Lang, but as a beginner I felt comfortable starting out on Ixi Lang due to its unambiguous instructions. Coding is an accessible platform for anyone interested in making electronic beats of any genre, and it’s an exciting and unpredictable way of producing audio. As well as enabling the user to create sounds immediately from their laptop, sounds made on Ixi Lang can be recorded and transferred into programs such as Ableton, or recorded samples can be transferred back into the coding software. It’s easy to see why live coding communities and Algoraves are getting more and more popular.

    https://soundcloud.com/norahlo/drone-bolge-iii

    https://soundcloud.com/belisha-beacon-beats/live-at-access-space-sheffield

    https://soundcloud.com/joannnne/wmt

    https://soundcloud.com/tiemposdelruido/zeezicht