TOPLAP was founded at the 2004 Changing Grammars symposium in Hamburg, giving live coding a name and community

The Changing Grammars symposium, convened by Renate Wieser and Julian Rohrhuber at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (HfbK) in Hamburg in February 2004, was the watershed moment of live coding: the meeting at which TOPLAP was constituted and immediately after which the TOPLAP manifesto was first drafted. Its stated theme was that some computer languages allow changing a running process on the fly by rewriting the code that defines it — applied to music, one can write sound compositions while they are already playing. SuperCollider was the main language used. The event’s significance is that it converted scattered, mutually-unaware individual experiments into a collective identity and shared name, ‘live coding’; the wiki and mailing list it spawned became the first sustained community.

Examples

Participants included Julian Rohrhuber, Nick Collins, Dave Griffiths, Ge Wang, and Amy Alexander; the TOPLAP logo was designed by Adrian Ward. Before the event, Alex McLean and Adrian Ward had performed since ~2000 as slub (writing music in Perl) without knowing others were doing similar work; the livecode mailing list has run since 2004.

Assessment

What event, roughly what date, and what location mark the founding of TOPLAP? What was the technical/artistic focus of Changing Grammars, and why is this meeting treated as more significant than any single performer’s start date?