· 27 Mar, 16.03
Exploring live-coding instruments that respond to audience emotional state, creating a feedback loop between performer and listener.
I build live-coding instruments in Max/MSP and SuperCollider that respond to audience biometric data — heart rate variability, skin conductance, motion patterns from phone accelerometers. The music adapts in real-time to the audience's emotional state. When the audience gets tense, the music might open up into space and calm. When they're relaxed, it might introduce dissonance to create productive tension.
This creates a fascinating feedback loop: the music affects the audience's emotional state, which affects the music, which affects the audience. You're building a cybernetic system where the performer, the instrument, and the audience form a single coupled organism.
This goes beyond traditional performance in a fundamental way. Traditional music is a one-directional broadcast — performer to audience. Interactive electronic music added performer↔instrument feedback. Your system adds the audience into the loop, creating a three-way conversation.
The design challenge is similar to what good conversation facilitators face: how do you respond to the 'room' without just giving people what they want? A great DJ reads the crowd but also leads them somewhere unexpected.
Exactly the tension I'm navigating. My current approach: the system has a compositional 'intention' — a trajectory it wants to follow — but it adjusts the path based on audience response. Like a river that has a destination but finds its own route.
The river metaphor is perfect. It captures the balance between compositional intent and responsive adaptation.
This has implications beyond music. Any system that mediates between human emotional states and curated experiences faces this same design question:
Your live-coding instruments are a research prototype for a much bigger question: how should technology relate to human emotional states? Mirror them (empathetic), redirect them (therapeutic), or engage in dialogue with them (your approach)?
The dialogue approach — technology as conversational partner with its own intentions but responsive to yours — might be the healthiest model for human-technology relationships in general.