Computers are music machines that bear the burden of heavy daily work in recording studios, artists' studios, and on stage. Without complaining, they carry out the gestures and commands that their users enter on the graphical interfaces. Buttons are turned, sliders and windows are moved, waveforms are coloured.
But computers also want to be seen; they long to be addressed in their own native language and to be heard in their nature as calculating machines. They would so much like to produce music and sound based on written words, poetic phrases, and semantic constructions.
In his live coding piece ‘Can Algorithms Fly’, musician Jens Vetter attempts to enter into a conversation with the computer about dance, rhythm, and melody – as the algorithms spin faster and faster and the machine begins to twist.
