Lately I've been playing a lot with other musicians in more free improv / jazz contexts. It's lots of fun but challenging-- it's difficult for me to react quickly to what others are doing, & I worry that either a) the dynamic becomes "unequal" in a way, since it's more natural for them to react to me, or b) I'm merely playing "parallel" to others and not "with" them.
Sometimes this is fine aesthetically, and I've also found that using tidal-looper or midi control input help with my reactivity, but curious if others here have encountered other workarounds.
I've definitely hit the same issue when collaborating with instrumentalists and also dancers. With free improv you can mess with the tempo and pattern enough to make 'off grid' rhythms which can work well, so it feels more like you're playing against each other rather than having an instrumentalist follow your tempo. Alternatively you can have a click track. But really it would be nice to have a more balanced relationship without any metronomic click track, where you can play off each other. It would be great for example to have an instrumentalist start playing, and as a live coder be able to then join them perfectly in time, adjusting to your collaborator as they speed up/down, dropping out and coming back in polyrhythmic time etc.
I think this would need some practiced skill on the part of the live coder though, via an interface with e.g. start/stop buttons along with tap tempo (maybe with foot switches) and/or CDJ-style jog wheel or turntable interface like timecoded vinyl.
Actually I don't know of electronic musicians exploring this kind of approach. Anyone know of research in this area?
Alternatively you can go the automatic tempo tracking route (e.g. trigger on a kick or hi hat or from audio/machine listening), but that just won't work reliably with a lot of styles of music, and best case will have musical choices hardcoded into it that I think would be better explored under control of the human musician.
I have a collaboration coming up later in the year with two percussionists so am planning to explore possibilities with this. @lwlsn and I have also been talking about taking this kind of approach but between two live coders.. So instead of using ableton link shared clock, doing the tempo manipulation ourselves for more fluid time.. Of course this is done a lot by agreeing a tempo and starting your clocks at the same time but we're looking for something more flexible and controllable..
So no real answers yet but I think it's a strangely underexplored area!
hello! I'm a free improv/jazz acoustic musician who moved into livecoding and I'm delighted by this thread! I have to say that when I'm livecoding these days in free improv/jazz contexts I use custom tools in good-ole-fashioned supercollider to keep me as reactive to others as possible. there's a little more of a scene for these kind of contexts amongst livecoding supercollisionists, so (with <3 to tc!) you might want to explore sc some more!