The International conference on the Psychology of Programming (PPIG) was hosted by Open University on 5 – 9 September 2022. This year’s theme was ‘Turing, Piaget, Radiohead: PPIG and the Muse’, aimed at sparking insights drawing on programming, abstractions, notations, psychology, and music. This was the first PPIG to be held physically since 2019, following the two online-only PPIGs in 2020 and 2021, both during the Covid pandemic. It was also the first PPIG conference to be designed specifically for hybrid attendance. Reflecting the theme, it was hosted by Music Computing Lab at the Open University in Milton Keynes, and held a mere ten minutes from Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and colleagues triumphed algorithmically in WWII. There were some 67 attendees. PPIG is the premier international conference on the Psychology of Programming, running annually since 1987. https://ppig.org/workshops/2022-annual-workshop
As part of PPIG, two invited drop-in workshops focusing on insights from musical rhythm were run for physical attendees concurrently on two floors of the Venables building. These were designed to be enjoyable and rewarding in their own right, and to promote reflection on issues of foundational interest to PPIG. Thanks to the workshop devisers and organisers:An algorithmic drumming circle was kindly designed and led by invited speaker Alex Mclean. Participants were invited to bring their own laptops to collectively investigate and make rhythms with Alex’s celebrated pattern weaving, manipulating and visualising systems, the Haskell-based Tidal, and the Web-based Strudel.Noam Lederman: drum conversations with a real-time improvisatory drum agent. An improvisational drumming circle was organised by international-level session drummer, and widely acknowledged music educator Noam Lederman. Participants were invited to improvise drum patterns using various hand drums in musical conversations with a real time drumming agent designed and programmed by Noam as part of his PhD work in-progress at the Music Computing Lab. Noam’s agent has been highly rated to date by professional drummers using it in shedding sessions – complementing this, the workshop demonstrated that the agent could be highly engaging for beginners as well.
