Collaborative Music Coding with Flok and Mercury for the Web

Learn how to collaboratively code music with Flok and Mercury. Lina & Timo teach you to program samples, synths, using algorithms to generate rhythms and melodies and more. You will work in groups and focus on communicating and listening while editing each others code. Working together will spark new ideas and you will learn from each others coding style. At the end everyone briefly performs and practices in a safe space.

The workshop starts with a short introduction about live coding and the use of collaborative live coding tools. The speakers will give a short demonstration on what live coding together can be like. The participants will learn the basics of the Mercury programming language and after that duos will be formed. The duos will create their own Flok session and join together to start coding on their music. We will end the workshop with a short open-stage where groups are invited to live code some music in front of the other participants to practice their live coding performance in a safe space.

Mercury is an open-source minimal and human-readable language developed by Timo Hoogland, that focuses on the expression of composing, performing and communicating live coded music. Flok is an open-source collaborative coding editor developed by Damián Silvani (a.k.a. Munshkr) that runs in the browser.

Requirements:

No advanced prior coding skills or musical background are required, but are of course useful to have.

If possible, participants should bring a laptop and headphones, with a chromium-based browser installed, such as Brave, Arc or Opera. All operating systems are possible.

The spoken language for the workshop is in English, but Dutch and Spanish are also possible.

img © Martin Bruner