With electronic music composition, curiosity, improvisation, and intuition are essential elements for creating interesting and conversational music. In addition to one’s musical medium, having a “feel” for its use gives rise to expressiveness. Yet, similarly to how people are attracted to playing certain instruments over others, the tools an electronic musician chooses can greatly influence the music they will produce.

The conceptual framework of musical livecoding is an abstraction through which we improvise, compose, and interact with the finest details of musical content. It is an intriguing way of developing an emotive sense of linear, text-based programming. To make livecoded music, one simultaneously exerts precise control over musical phenomena while abstracting that knowledge to develop an intuitive sense of control. Somewhere in-between is found the “glue” which unites these musical ends into a sort of Möbius strip, and when finished, you have a complete object: a piece of music.

An inventor at heart, Ashlae Blūme is a musician, composer, and technologist with a penchant for the unknown. She uses sound and polymedia to explore social constructs and deconcept conventional notions of “should.”