How Melody Loveless Makes Computer Code Sing
Melody Loveless, a 30-year-old Brooklynite, is on stage. She stands at a table with her hands resting on the keyboard of her MacBook. Digital drones and bleeps begin to sound from the speakers, as a metallic drum beat settles into a downtempo trip-hop rhythm; it has the tone of someone striking a tuning fork against the chassis of a robot. Loveless hums in a high register into a microphone and begins to loop her voice.
As the music builds, a stream of her laptop screen is projected behind her. The text begins to move. Loveless types new lines, chopping and manipulating her vocal sample. The code cascades, changing as musical elements are introduced or discarded—a new drum machine beat, a new phrase from her synth library.
Loveless is a live coder—part of a movement of digital artists who write music and visuals on the fly, with their programming displayed as part of the performance.
Nearly all pop music is now a digital endeavor: recorded, edited, tuned up and mixed using software. #
For livecoders, the computer is more than a tool. It is a collaborator. Artists type lines of code that lay out the structure and boundaries of a song—tempo, tonality, rhythm. Algorithms then leave their mark, drawing melody out of the digital void, or processing vocal lines nearly beyond recognition. Livecoding dance parties, known as Algoraves, were first held in London in 2011 and have since gone global, drawing crowds in cities from Bogota to New York to Mumbai.
Livecoding also has an ethos, Loveless says. The software is free; the code is open-source; the gatherings where coders trade tips are accessible to newcomers. It is a scene that is proudly unowned.
“Electronic music doesn't have a reputation for being cheap,” Loveless says. “And here we have this huge community that's about sharing free software and showing our code in screens and we're all secretly socialists, probably. It makes me happy to be part of a livecoding scene within all these awful things happening in tech. Cause here we are showing our codes, being super transparent with what we're doing, using free stuff."
Loveless grew up all over, she says. She was born in San Diego; her mother, a nurse, was the first in her family to immigrate from the Philippines to the United States. Loveless’ parents split up when she was a toddler, and her mother preferred not to stay in one place for long. Loveless has lived in Hawaii, Florida, a sequence of Las Vegas neighborhoods and New York. The itinerant childhood left Loveless with a love of travel and few long-term friends.
"I'm still figuring out my relationship to home. There are some people who don't leave their home their whole life, and the idea of even going to Disney World is a big idea—you know what I mean? Something so fucking lame.”
Like countless other teens of her generation, Loveless had her first encounters with computer coding on MySpace—the mid-2000s, lamented social network that launched a thousand emo bands. Users could use HTML, the basic language of web design, to paint their pages with garish colors and autoplay their favorite songs. Loveless was motivated by a loathing for the “top 8,” a notorious Myspace feature that fostered endless high school social dramatics by encouraging users to rank their favorite friends.
"Before they were flexible with the top 8, I went in and made these tiny icons for all of my friends,” Loveless says. “I had like a top 30 that I made with HTML."
She majored in classical percussion performance at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and then moved across the country to earn a master’s in music composition at New York University. To pay the rent, she took a job handling returns at the newly opened Whole Foods in Gowanus. It did not go well. She played shows when she could, but felt pulled aside from her art, dealing instead with the retail crises of Brooklyn’s stressed-out kale moms and yoga dads. Loveless sought work in tech, but found it difficult to get hired without a degree in computer science. She enrolled in the Integrated Digital Media program at NYU’s engineering school, studying coding, art and where the two meet.
"I would describe it to my friends as future school,” Loveless says. “It's all about emerging technologies."
I ask her to show me how livecoding works—how she takes the syntax and makes it sing. She powers up her Macbook, which is plugged into a small red mixer on her kitchen table, and opens Sonic Pi, a coding environment used frequently by livecoders since its release in 2012. She types strings of text into a terminal—the file names of instrument samples to pull into the track and the commands that speed them up or slow them down, sharpen them or cushion them in reverb.
"Is this working?" she says under her breath. "Fuck yeah it is."
Loveless says she does not often speak to her computer, but she's tired. She has a concert tonight, and she's spent the day writing up a curriculum for a class she will be teaching in the spring.
"Ok, please don't break," she says as the bass sets in. #
Loveless loops her voice into a tonal hum and enters a string of numbers telling her synth which notes it is allowed to play. She sets out a tempo and rhythm, and the program begins playing an algorithmically generated melody that starts simple, then accelerates and changes. A synth rises and flares, like a raygun in a 50s sci-fi serial, as Loveless begins cooing dreamy wordless vocals over the beat. She types hash marks in front of lines of code—what programmers call “commenting out”— and those loops fall silent in real time.
It is a style of composition that suits her, she says. Transparent and honest; improvisational, yet deliberate; concerned more with process and experimentation than personal virtuosity.
"I'm very inaccurate, so I'm not really the best classical performer,” Loveless says. “Being able to play around in an environment where I can have more time to make my decisions and have the tech help me out is far more appealing."
Loveless was introduced to livecoding by Kate Sicchio, one of her professors at NYU. Sicchio, who now teaches livecoding at Virginia Commonwealth University, is a trained choreographer. In 2011, she was living in Sheffield, England, and experimenting with ways to blend her art with her interest in programming. She translated her dances into a “pseudolanguage,” creating choreography scores that functioned like computer code—her steps translated into text, to be executed by dancers like a computer executes a program. A colleague recommended she meet with Alex McLean, a pioneer in the U.K’s nascent livecoding scene who had recently coined the term “algorave.”
“He was like ‘Oh, you’re doing this thing called livecoding.’ I was like ‘Oh, cool,’ ” Sicchio says. “That’s how I discovered livecoding—I was already doing it, and somebody put a name to it for me.”
When Sicchio moved to New York in 2014, she brought livecoding with her. She began meeting with the coders Jason Levine, Ramsey Nasser and Tom Murphy, and the four of them launched Livecode NYC—the first group in the city dedicated to their new art form. She got hired as a professor at NYU, where Loveless was studying digital media. In 2017, Sicchio brought Loveless to the Source Festival, a livecoding showcase on NYU’s campus. Loveless was not immediately sold.
“At first she was like. ‘I don’t really get this kind of thing,’ ” Sicchio says. “She had this moment where she had this epiphany—it’s process music. It’s this idea of actually seeing music unfold.”
Loveless has since established herself as a mainstay in the city’s livecoding scene. She joined Codie, Sicchio and Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo's electronic music group, and plays solo shows at galleries, clubs and art spaces. In the spring she began teaching creative coding at Hunter College and livecoding at the New School. She hopes the art world might soon consider coding an artistic medium as versatile and essential as any other; that art students might be taught to think of Python or Ruby in the same way they think of oil paints or charcoal.
"I really like that idea that like, hey, this might be a foundational class for someone just being an artist because of how important tech is,” Loveless says.
At 9 p.m. in late November, a chill settled across an outwardly desolate stretch of Thames Avenue in Bushwick. A woman in a bicycle helmet peers at the graffiti-tagged brick building that, supposedly, is home to Synesthesia—a gallery and art space where Loveless is scheduled to perform.
Synesthesia, it turns out, is a third-floor loft apartment, laid out with a large projector screen covering sheet glass windows. I’m buzzed inside and met inside the doorway by the space’s curator Mio Nakai, who recently turned her home into a venue for experimental music, dance and audio-visual performances. An audience of about 30 young people sit in rows of mismatched chairs or perch on the loft’s landing.
About half an hour into the event, Loveless begins her set. She stands hunched over her laptop at a wooden table and with a few keystrokes launches a spare, echoey drumbeat. She begins to loop her voice, rising in a diffuse all-vowel hum. Languorous synth notes build in cascading phrases. A line of code is highlighted and changed on the screen behind her, and a watery melody line grows and intensifies.
Loveless types numbers, and the rhythm of the drum beat changes; another few keystrokes and her voice is chopped and transformed into a fractured plaintive cry.
She counts off to eight and begins chopping and layering her vocals over a sample of an insistent syncopated hi-hat. In the front row, a girl in a dark baseball cap nods her head and bops her right leg, crossed over her knee. In the rear, up on the loft stairs, feet and heads increasingly move in rhythm. A quick copy-paste and the synth doubles on itself, falling over its own feet. An edit and the notes extend another octave, into a bell-like glissando. The right side of the screen is now a blur of file names in blocky magenta type, jumping downward as each phrase plays and repeats. Loveless remains bent over at the mic, her eyes fixed on the MacBook screen: she looks up only at the end and smiles.
Loveless says she has a plan whenever she goes on stage—when to sing, when to loop, the structure of her composition. But livecoding has a way of making plans change. A song might become hazy and dreamy if she’s tired, or pulse with energy if her mind is racing. When she’s performing, she tells herself to be calm. To focus on the music as though it is the only thing that matters.
"There's definitely an emotional part. I still get that performer high, euphoria,” Loveless says. "That's a really nice feeling.”
There is a livecode manifesto that is kept fittingly in draft form, forever subject to change like the music it speaks for. It warns against obscurantism and urges artists to think of algorithms as extensions of their thoughts, rather than tools. Sicchio says the movement’s vision for computing runs contrary to how Silicon Valley has molded the American image of coding— commercialized, precise, proprietary and bluntly utilitarian.
“It’s much more about error and fragility and seeing where algorithms take you,” she says. “Here, software development is about a product and solving a problem. Livecoding isn’t about that. Livecoding is ephemeral.”
Loveless music lives in a space between high-concept art and dreamy electro-pop. She loves the deliberately pretty songwriting of the Postal Service and the eclectic minimalism of experimental electronic musician Carl Stone. When I ask what drew her to livecoding, she says it’s like a sensory puzzle; you can hear it, and see how it’s made. It shows the audience a magic trick while revealing how to do it; it inverts the ideas of coder as an isolated architect and musician as an unapproachable genius into something more democratic and free.
"It challenges the idea of what a performer should be. Or what should be portrayed as the most important part of a performance,” Loveless says. "I think I just like the idea of options."
*Editor's Note (3/11/2020): This story has been updated to include mention of Codie band member Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo, whose name was previously omitted. *