Live coding at Stress Less Week
2026-05-25
Stress Less Week was my first solo live coding performance, and my first outside of Code Jam. My friend Hannah asked if I wanted to be part of the University of Melbourne’s “Stress Less Week”, a relaxing break before exam season. This was a challenging pitch for me, given my live-coded music has been very stress-forward.
I wanted to trigger video samples from code, but I couldn’t find any software that did exactly what I wanted. So I wrote my own, which takes MIDI input and plays a snippet of a video. I sampled LCD Soundsystem’s New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down and Charli xcx’s I think about you every single day and night.
The setup was a little bit stupid. Strudel sent MIDI to my website running in Chrome. The audio from both went through Blackhole into Ableton, and then out to an audio interface. OBS recorded the Chrome window and laid the Strudel window over it. In the end, OBS kept making Chrome lag, so I never shared my code with the audience.
I did two performances, so I could change and improve things between them. For more, read June’s newsletter.