What‘s going on with all these code-2-music tools these days? See other front page discussion about strudel.cc [1]. Did I enter an established bubble or is there a rising trend? It‘s incredible, though, what people are able to obtain with it, especially when built-up during a live session [2].
Computer music is as old as computers, live coding is pretty old too. (I posted this in the strudel discussion too: https://toplap.org/wiki/HistoricalPerformances) Maybe everyone doing live streams during the pandemic helped get visibility for live coding? It's interesting to see it kind of becoming popular now.
Live coding music/visuals/art has been a fairly major subculture for over 15 years: https://blog.toplap.org/ Prior to that there was plenty of live/interactive code-based music going on within the computer music scene, HMSL (FORTH based)[1] and CLM (Lisp based)[2] come to mind.
Real-time sound synthesis was tough to live-code, or to run in real-time at all, prior to the faster personal computers of the early 90s. (The tracker scene obviously pre-dates this, but in that case the actual sound synthesis algorithms weren't live coded.) In fact, code-to-music dates back to 1951[3], or 1957[4], depending on your definitions. There is a large history of development by many computer musicians following on from Max Matthews' MUSIC-N. The Computer Music Tutorial[5] is a good source for the academic/research institutions/serious composers part of the picture.
CSOUND is the oldest code-2-music framework I know of, and that's been here since the 80's, so the concept is not new
The tools/frameworks have become more plentiful, approachable, and mature over the past 10-15 years, to the point where you can just go to strudel.cc and start coding music right from your browser.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46052478 [2] Nice example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GWXCCBsOMSg