SuperCollider: JITLib live coding

This module builds toward the defining act of SuperCollider performance practice: an algorave-style live-coded set where the code editor is the instrument and the audience hears every decision. Unlike studio work, nothing can stop — a click, a dropped node, or a server error is a public failure. Everything here serves one whole task: keeping sound running continuously while its generating program is rewritten underneath it.

The arc starts supported. First internalize the paradigm shift — a running program as ongoing construction, not compile-then-run — then practice the core move in isolation: give an Ndef a new source and hear the crossfade replace the old one gaplessly (“NodeProxy and Ndef are SuperCollider’s server-side placeholders whose synthesis source can be swapped while playing” and the crossfade-redefinition atom are the JIT references to keep open). Next, push a ProxySpace and grow a small modular patch: audio-rate proxies feeding filter and effect proxies, control-rate proxies mapped onto their arguments with .map/xmap, rewriting any stage while the rest keeps sounding. Then bring in the pattern layer — Pdef and Tdef as client-side proxies — so rhythmic and melodic processes become hot-swappable too. Finally, remove the scaffolding: build the setup file (buffers, SynthDefs, limiter, clock) with ServerBoot/ServerTree ordering, and perform.

The required atoms are exactly what the capstone cannot survive without: proxy redefinition, crossfading, ProxySpace patching, control mapping, pattern proxies, SynthDef conventions that keep long sets from choking the server, and the setup-file architecture that makes crash recovery possible. Supporting atoms widen the horizon — networked collaborative proxies, limiter-pumping as a creative effect, quarks, class extensions, and the philosophy of intervening in a process by changing its laws — enriching a set that already stands.

Runnable examples

Generated from the context/ instrument corpus by concept (redistributable idioms only). Do not edit — regenerate with gen-module-examples.mjs.

sidechain-pump

note("c2").s("sawtooth").duckorbit(1).duck("bd*4")

_{strudel-0017 · CC0}

~duck: imp 4 >> envperc 0.001 0.15 >> mul -1.0 >> add 1.0
out: saw 110 >> lpf 600 1.0 >> mul ~duck >> mul 0.3

_{glicol-0029 · MIT}