Legacy in the loop: how Ableton's Live produces and preserves techno

Digital audio workstations (DAWs) are often categorized as interchangeable tools, suggesting them as slight variations of the same standard. However, reducing these systems to “mundane applications” (Mackenzie, 2006, p. 2) overlooks the specific sociocultural contexts in which they are developed. DAWs are not neutral tools. They encode and impact culture. Ableton’s Live, in particular, is intrinsically linked to Berlin’s early techno scene. As Ableton-CEO, Gerhard Behles, remarked on the RA Exchange podcast (2017) when asked about the impact of electronic music culture: “There would be no Ableton otherwise. It’s clearly everything comes out that nucleus of initial experience.” This statement suggests that the culture is coded into the software’s very architecture.This paper explores the concept of “legacy code” as a framework for understanding how cultural ideas are coded into Live and subsequently, how they are sustained and expanded on (Crowdy, 2022). Legacy code refers to inherited software that carries technical and cultural decisions of the past, making it a “collective history that we can learn from” (Goodman, 2020) while exposing that software might not be as fluid as it appears, embedding past logics into future practices (Neff & Stark, 2002). From this perspective, the development of Ableton Live reflects the minimalist and improvisational logics of techno culture.However, studying proprietary software poses methodological challenges as access to materials (documentation, internal discussions, development processes etc.) are restricted. Following Seaver (2022, 2017) gathering information about software as sociotechnical systems entails collecting data from multiple sites and in various forms: interviews, conferences, web archives etc. This approach allows for the investigation into the complex entanglements of materials and actions in software (Manovich, 2013). This research highlights the importance of understanding DAWs, not merely as tools for producing culture, but also preserving culture, connecting the past and future of electronic music culture.