"Hello World". Musica a programma per il terzo millennio

Some practices of artistic creation are founded on the juxtaposition of two languages or two different media, such as setting a text to music. As a producer of hybrid artefacts, this practice poses multiple problems related to its aesthetic and semantic status. In this article, I will focus on a piece (Hello, World by Nicola Campogrande) that allows me to reflect on these issues and adds a further complication: the texts to be set to music are written in source code. After a brief discussion of the features of source code and of their reaction to being set to music, I will turn specifically to Campogrande's piece to show that source code can be considered as an ideal material for reflecting on the far more widespread practice of setting natural language texts to music. In addition, Hello, World equally questions current practices of reading the code itself.