Hi clangers, I thought I'd share a relatively unique and successful experience I've been facilitating the last 12 months (our 1 year anniversary is this week!), which is a weekly collaborative livecoding jam session.
As a regular player of analog instruments in a predominantly jazz influenced context, the "jam" was such a core and entertaining part of that experience. I wanted to recreate and explore what that meant in a livecoding context where (essentially) everyone can play all the instruments, all the time - and without any pre-planning/preparation. I don't know who will show up, or what they know - everything develops very organically in the moment.
I've jammed with *heaps* of different people, playing different styles, from beginners to released/professional artists. Regulars have come and gone, I've struck up friendships and I've learnt so much from watching others (and I hope the participants have got similar benefits!).
I've got to watch the estuary platform grow and improve with some incredible features going in, I've learnt to compose visual complements to the generated audio when there were no other visualists and I've discovered a lot about collaborative livecoding etiquette (in short, play less! Give players space to create).
Above all, it's been a huge amount of fun and I'd love for anyone here to join me sometime - it runs every Saturday @ 20:00 - 21:00 UTC
The platform used is Estuary (https://estuary.mcmaster.ca in the "WeekEndJam" room) which is completely browser-based and "safe" (no local code execution). It caters to a few different livecoding languages, but to this point it's been predominantly tidalcycles (minitidal), punctual, cinecer0 and hydra usage.
If you feel like having a short peruse through some of the jams, 1-2 min highlights are on twitch:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1264790971?filter=highlights&sort=time
If you feel like digging deeper, the full archives live on youtube:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt8O3WdGnQjfCNVBK2O0W0_nwiSgWIoFR
Thanks for setting up a nice/welcoming/diverse future music community, and I hope to be able to provide more community oriented content over time!
Bernie (aka cleary)