As part of the Guardian’s underground music series, we asked readers where they thought we should be looking for weird scenes. We’ll round up the best suggestions next week to close out the series, but one that stuck out to me was algorave, put forward by an anonymous reader from Sheffield: “This is music created using computer code which is written live in front of an audience … Places in Sheffield hold algoraves where this music is created on the fly with accompanying also live-coded visuals.”

Intrigued, I researched it on YouTube, and it was so different to anything I listen to. I recognise a human heartbeat running through salsa or hip-hop that makes it feel close and familiar; the electronic sound on the algorave videos made me think more of the beep of a heart monitor. That said, I felt curious to know more, and went to the AlgoMech festival in Sheffield to make a short documentary about the scene.

Play Video 5:54 Run the code: is algorave the future of dance music? – video

The festival was run by Alex McLean, the creator of Tidal Cycles, the main program live coders use to make music. He invited me along to a workshop so I could try writing some code both for music and visuals. My main concern was that, having zero knowledge of coding, everything might go right over my head, but the programming language was relatively straightforward and came with instructions, and soon enough I was making my own music.

At the rave, most people – many of them women – were looking up at the projected codes rather than each other. It felt in many ways like an art performance with some dancing, and as my curiosity was satisfied I really started to understand its appeal.

And my initial impression of algorave, that it was far removed from humanity, shifted through conversations I had with the likeable and friendly performers. As Antonio Roberts, a visual artist who makes algorave as hellocatfood, says: “As much as I like how computers are very good at automating things, I like to step in there and disrupt what the computers doing, and take back control. In that way it becomes more human.”