Programming language source code underlies almost all digital technology. The emerging practice of Live Coding brings source code from technical craft to live performance; a shift from the idea of the computer program as a tool, towards the idea of computer code as a medium for live interaction and improvisation, opening new avenues for human creativity.

Live Coding can be understood as making fundamental source code changes to software while it runs, in order to change its behaviour. The classic Live Coding performance consists of one or more programmers on stage, writing and modifying code in order to improvise music and/or video animation (Collins et al., 2003). The code is continually running while being written and modified, creating an unbroken, improvised performance for an audience, who are able to see the code being written as an integral aspect of the work.

Live Coding now features in invited themes and programmes of major international conferences and festivals, and features several research subtopics; perception and action in time (Sorensen and Gardner, 2010), visual representation in/of live code (McLean et al., 2010), intra-programmer interaction through live code (Rohrhuber et al., 2007), issues of programmer creativity (McLean and Wiggins, in press), and live coding without computers, where dancers execute the code (Collins, 2011). This research is based upon well-established paradigms of computer science and music research, but Live Coding has brought unique focus motivating the invention of new programming environments and notations (e.g. ChucK, Fluxus, Impromptu, IXI lang, Overtone andTidal).