Live Algorithm Manifesto
The term 'live algorithm' was coined by Tim Blackwell and Michael Young as part of an EPSRC funded network in 2005. The network brought together 70 international researchers to establish an interdisciplinary community of musicians, software engineers and cognitive scientists interest in autonomous musical software. The endeavor marries the practices of free improvisation, live electronics and algorithmic composition.
In their original manifesto, Blackwell and Young suggested that a Live Algorithm should exhibit the following characteristics:
interactivity, autonomy, innovation, idiosyncrasy and comprehensibility
Strong interactivity depends on instigation and surprise as well as response. Individual decision-making is immediate, necessary and basic: when to play or not, when to modify activity in any number of parameters (loudness, pitch, tone quality), when to imitate or ignore another participant, when to ‘agree’ the performance is concluding. When to make a decision. And why.
Without the capacity to innovate, listeners would lose the belief that the LA was truly engaged with the performance instead of merely accompanying it.
The iterative, generative, idiosyncratic world of algorithmic organisation must be accessed, but the mechanical and the predictable must be avoided.
It is the ability to innovate that distinguishes automation from autonomy. It is not hard to generate music of great complexity.
Harder, though, is to ensure that these contributions are comprehensible to fellow performers in real-time who might be hearing these ideas for the first time. (But an incomprehensible, opaque system can be contrasted with a transparent one where the association between input and output is too trivial.)