Live Coding Academy
Learn to make live electronic music and visuals by writing code — hands-on, from your first sound to a performed set. Two courses of worked, runnable lessons, backed by a deep reference library distilled from open, freely-licensed teaching material.
Start here — the course
Two zero-to-performing paths built as worked lessons: you open the editor, type each step, and hear or see it — every code snippet is machine-verified to actually run. Start with the one you want to make.
No prior music or code experience; browser-first (Strudel), graduating to SuperCollider/Tidal-class tools. The learner wants to make music by typing code and, eventually, to perform it live on stage.
No prior graphics or code experience; browser-first (Hydra), graduating to GLSL shaders and creative-coding frameworks
Reference library
Everything below is reference, not a course — searchable knowledge you can walk, but not (yet) built into step-by-step lessons. It backs the two courses above and stands on its own for dipping in.
Other paths — syllabus outlines (not yet built into lessons)
A performer who already has a single-medium footing — ideally having done the live-coder (music) or live-visualist (visuals) path — and now wants to drive sound and image together as one tightly-synced instrument. This path assumes the music and visual fundamentals and concentrates on the integration layer: feature extraction, audio-reactive mapping, tempo/transport sync, generative and AI layers, and the stagecraft of holding a whole AV set together live.
Producer or hobbyist who wants to perform music on hardware (modular/Eurorack, grooveboxes, no computer) rather than in a DAW
Aspiring DJ who loves music and wants to select and mix records/tracks and play out for real crowds. No production experience assumed; the goal is selection-and-mixing craft, not making tracks.
Aspiring studio producer; some listening taste, no formal training assumed; DAW or dawless-agnostic but studio-oriented. Wants to make finished, released electronic tracks.
Coder/artist with some live-coding or creative-coding footing who wants to build real-time generative and AI-driven audio-visual systems and perform with them
Music journalist / scene historian / curator / critic who wants to understand and write about electronic-music lineages, scenes, and their politics rather than perform or produce. The deliverable medium is PUBLISHED WRITING and a defensible critical position, not a performance.
Crate-digger / beatmaker / sound-collagist whose instrument is recorded sound itself — field recording, break-mining, chopping and re-contextualising samples — rather than synthesis, hardware, or DJ selection. Wants to build a personal sample voice and release a curated, cleared sample-based work.
Real-time GPU / shader artist (Shadertoy / demoscene lineage) whose medium is the fragment shader itself — raymarched SDF scenes, procedural noise/fractal fields, lighting and physically-based rendering — rather than Hydra video-synth, venue clip-VJing, or AI-diffusion visuals.
Synthesist / sound-designer whose instrument is the synthesis engine itself — deep DSP (additive, wavetable, advanced FM, granular, spectral, physical-modeling, formant/voice synthesis), patch design, and a performed live synth rig — rather than DAW track production, modular hardware, or live-coded patterns. They want to design voices from first-principles DSP and perform them, backed by a sound-design portfolio.
Visual performer who wants to play out: mixing clips/generative sources, mapping projection, driving LEDs/DMX, and syncing to a DJ or band across a whole night at a venue.
Browse the knowledge graph — by level
What is this world, what are the paths — install nothing yet.
The transferable primitives: rhythm, sound, the shared vocabulary.
Pick one lane and make a first loop, patch, or shader.
Arrangement, sound-design depth, modulation, audio-reactive craft.
Playing live: dawless, controllerism, DJing, VJ mixing, recovery.
A personal style; releasing, scenes, community, sustaining a practice.
By domain — the 16 streams