Live coding has evolved considerably since its emergence in the early 2000s, as presented in the seminal 2003 Organised Sound (8/3) article ‘Live Coding in Laptop Performance’ by Collins, McLean, Rohrhuber and Ward. Differentiating itself from early laptop music and other computer music, it is a performance practice that promotes the sharing of the musical process with the audience, emphasising the code itself as a form of musical notation. Live coding has been adopted into various fields of art, but as musical algorithmic thinking, it has been explored and developed by many practitioners and collectives across the world up to the present and there is a broad range of divergent practices within the field.

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Threnoscope performance at the Borealis Festival in Bergen

We are therefore thrilled to present the special issue ‘Live Coding Sonic Creativities’, which is the first special issue on live coding in Organised Sound. This has been a long journey of almost two years of work. In response to the invitation by Leigh Landy and James Andean in September 2021, we decided to offer a free online workshop to interested authors and a cycle of early draft feedback for early career authors. The workshop received 38 expressions of interest from around the globe. The workshop, which was held on 30 May 2022, gave us the opportunity to form a platform for authors to discuss and develop their ideas related to the special issue. Eight of the articles published here are from authors who took part in the workshop. Overall, we think this process was helpful and inclusive to the authors because several of the authors are publishing in the OS journal for the first time.