“Andrew Sorensen is an Australian musician and programmer, author of the Impromptu live coding environment as well as a live coding musician of note. I recently caught up with his latest work, documented as screencasts on his site. In A Study in Keith Sorensen builds a Keith Jarrett machine that juxtaposes two linked layers of performance - qwerty and (phantom) piano keyboard. Stained (left) is a striking twist on the “transparent” aesthetics of live coding, as Sorensen uses Impromptu to draw in, and manipulate, the code window, hooking the graphics into the musical algorithms. These works demonstrate (for me at least) how live coding can be honed to a fine point, as a performance form. They’re improvised, but also controlled and restrained; they work well as music, but clearly the real performance here is also in the developing code structures. It’s in the combination of those two structural levels - the emotional impact of tonal music and the abstract, formal domain of code - that these works are really strong. In this conversation Sorensen touches on the live coding scene, performance, craft and virtuosity, code as score, coding without computers and algorithm as thought.” Continue reading From Scratch - A Conversation with Andrew Sorensen by Mitchell Whitelaw, The Teeming Void.