Music Written on Stage

In a dark room a laptop screen is projected onto the wall, and on the screen there are only a few lines of text. A person at a table adds a couple of characters to one of them, hits some keys, and the kick, which until then had been hitting evenly four times a bar, starts stumbling into a tricky broken pattern. The room responds before it has time to read the line. A minute later the person deletes half the code, and the music thins out along with the text, and the people on the dance floor can see what he removed and why it got quieter.

This is what an algorave looks like, a party where music is written by a program right in front of the audience. Musicians who play this way are called live coders, and they have their own culture, their own instruments and even their own manifesto.