Loose notes on live coding as research

Conferences

The International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC) has happened nine times so far (as of May 2026) and is the definitive/central site where live coding is articulated as a research/academic/scholarly project. I chaired/spearheaded the second instance of the conference at McMaster in 2016, with the support of a team of colleagues (Kate Sicchio, Christina Baade, Graham Wakefield, Luis Navarro, Jamie Beverley) and a grant from SSHRC's Connections programs. I was able to participate in all of the first five conferences, and then also the ninth (in Barcelona). One of the things I really appreciate about ICLC is the way the text ICLC proceedings appear in a timely way and present a contemporary snapshot of live coding research. Here's a list of the first nine ICLC conferences - with the passage of time, I might evolve this list into more of a personalized commentary on my recollections and points of particular inspiration in connection with each conference:

1. University of Leeds, UK, 2015
2. McMaster University, Canada, 2016
3. Morelia, México, 2017
4. Madrid, Spain, 2019
5. Limerick, Ireland, 2020
6. Valdivia, Chile, 2021
7. Utrecht, The Netherlands, 2023
8. NYU Shanghai, China, 2024
9. Barcelona, Catalonia, 2025

Another regular conference about live coding is the Hybrid Live Coding Interfaces conference, which happened five times between 2020 and 2024. It was a much less formal conference than ICLC, and happened (I think) entirely virtual/online and partially during the pandemic. The web archive for the Hybrid Live Coding Interfaces conference lets you watch most of the presentations from each iteration of the conference.

There are also a number conferences that are not about live coding, but where live coding has somewhat frequently appeared, such as:

• the annual international conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME). There's a page on the NIME website for Proceedings and it lists all of the NIME papers ever (easy to look through for live coding related results).
• the International Computer Music Conference
• the Sound and Music Computing (SMC) conference
• the Web Audio Conference (WAC) - I notice that the page for this one doesn't include the web audio conferences that have happened after 2021, at the time of writing, but they have definitely happened!

Publications (especially books, special issues, reports)

• Live Coding: A User's Manual. MIT Press 2022 . By Alan F. Blackwell, Emma Cocker, Geoff Cox, Alex McLean and Thor Magnusson, with contributions from many others. I think this is the only full-length academic book explicitly about live coding and only live coding, and you can read the whole thing open access.
• 2018's Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music (edited by Roger T. Dean and Alex McLean) was not only about live coding but live coding is strongly present in it.
• 2014 special issue of Computer Music Journal on Live Coding. I think this was the first and only journal special issue devoted entirely to live coding. It's not open access unfortunately, although I tend to think most of the articles in it can be found as author-released pre-prints in various places (I need to do that with my own contribution sometime soon!)
• 2013 Dagstuhl seminar on "Collaboration and learning through live coding"
• 2011's The SuperCollider Book (edited by Scott Wilson, David Cottle, and Nick Collins) is not only about live coding but lots of authors active in live coding contributed to it, and given the way that SuperCollider is often used in such a live-codey way, I think it should be understood as part of the published canon of research about live coding.
• Not a book but, I think the earliest academic publication to talk about live coding explicitly was this one: Nick Collins, Alex McLean, Julian Rohrhuber, Adrian Ward (2004). "Live coding in laptop performance." Organised Sound 8:3, pp. 321-330.
• [to develop] Articles from/about powerbooks unplugged