Live Coding in a Scalable, Participatory Laptop Orchestra
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Live coding (Collins et al. 2003 and other articles in this special issue of Computer Music Journal) is the central performance practice of the Cybernetic Orchestra, a laptop orchestra at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Inspired by the idea of participatory culture, the ensemble has been made open to a diverse and ever changing roster of participants, and may be likened to a human laboratory exploring this question: How is live coding scalable onto larger groups of people coming from diverse backgrounds? This article presents the practices that have developed during the first three years of the Cybernetic Orchestra's existence, starting with a summary of our human organization and physical infrastructure. The EspGrid software, developed for enhanced network synchronization and sharing, is reviewed before a final section presents the live coding practices that have crystallized around this specific collective of people, equipment, and code.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it