From code editor to art gallery

“From code editor to art gallery performance – generative music in the browser” is a talk about how I turned some JavaScript and three Chrome tabs into an ambient live act. I gave it in September 2024 at the Beyond Code conference near Olsztyn, and on 28 January 2025 at meet.js Białystok #61 in Gwint club.

What it covers

It starts with the basics: what sound is, and what music is. Then a short history of generative music – from the 18th-century “dice game” attributed to Mozart, where you assembled a waltz from randomly picked bars, through Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain” with its tape loops slowly drifting out of phase and Terry Riley’s “In C”, to Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports”. Eno is the one who named it generative music: music that plays indefinitely and never the same way twice. (This summary is based on the Beyond Code recording.)

The second part is my own path: from my 2016 film “Lekcja muzyki” and the song “Frontend is an art”, through learning to DJ and Projekt New Hope, to POGWAR – generative ambient I built in six weeks for a performance at Galeria Arsenał in August 2023. Step by step I build a single piece in Tone.js: a synth and its envelope, reverb and delay, a second voice an octave lower, a randomised sampled piano, undulating noise. Then I show the p5.js mixer I used to pick tracks live from several browser tabs.

The last part is about getting it to run on a phone: the cost of effects, why samples beat synthesis there, a silent audio loop that keeps the browser from suspending the script once the screen locks, and the Media Session API for showing the “track” on the lock screen.

Sources

• Od edytora kodu do występu w galerii sztuki • Maciek Korsan • Beyond Code 2024, YouTube (Beyond Code channel), in Polish
• Beyond Code 2024, Crossweb – 19–20 Sept 2024
• #61 meet.js Białystok, Crossweb – 28 Jan 2025, Gwint club (in Polish)
• maciejkorsan/pogwar, GitHub – POGWAR source code