Tangibility and Low-Level Live Coding

Current advances in digital fabrication are accompanied by efforts to bring about increased facility in the fabrication of digital circuits. In this context, tangibility can apply to the intimate contact with objects as programmable entities forming part of the human-material loop in the sense of physical computing. In this paper, we explore the possibilities of making music with very simple circuits, using an equally minimal interface for live interaction with the hardware. Our aim is to find new ways for experiencing the behavior of circuits and for navigating inside the data space of generative algorithms with musical devices by using minimal interfaces, while involving both human and machine in the perception of the musical output. In our experiment we have focused on the lowest level of the machine language [1], that of manipulating bits in real-time. Furthermore, we attempt to tighten the loop between human and machine by introducing a machine listening component which processes the output of the human-machine interaction. This splits the perceptual feedback loop into a human and a machine part, and makes the final output a joint outcome of both.