Student research opportunities
Coding for an audience: visual feedback and code markup for live coding performance
Project Code: CECS_962
This project is available at the following levels:
CS single semester, Engn4200, Honours, Masters
Supervisors:
Assoc Professor Henry GardnerDr Ben Swift
Outline:
In 'live coding'[1] a programmer/aritst writes a program to generate
audiovisual material (often music) in real-time, in front of an
audience. During a performance, the source code is projected onto a
screen as it is edited for the audience's benefit.
This display of code for an audience is a key part of the practice of
livecoding, but many audience members lack the required background
knowledge (either musical, programming or both) to fully comprehend
the relationship between the code on the screen and the
musical material they are hearing. Some techniques have been
proposed [2] for visual 'annotations' to the code which may assist
the audience in their comprehension.
This project involves investigating various methods of presenting
source code in the context of a live coding performance in
Extempore[3]. This involves the design, implementation (Extempore
supports both 2D graphics with Cairo[4]/OpenVG[5] and 3D graphics with
OpenGL[6]) and evaluating their effectiveness in live coding with a
real audience.
[1] For an example of livecoding, see e.g. http://vimeo.com/videos/benswift
[2] http://eprints.qut.edu.au/61525/1/liveannotations.pdf
[3] http://extempore.moso.com.au
[4] http://www.cairographics.org
[5] http://www.khronos.org/openvg/
[6] http://www.khronos.org/opengl/
