TidalCycles – A language for the Live Coding pattern | Hacker News Reader

TidalCycles – A language for the Live Coding pattern

tidalcycles.org

163 pointsbojo57 comments

Tidal (they added cycles when the Tidal music service came afterwards) is great fun. I was hoping to get Hylogen working with it.

Hylogen is an EDSL for livecoding shaders in Haskell [1]

My weapon of choice is Extempore by Andrew Sorensen [1]. Dual languages in one system available for blistering speed in livecoded graphics and sound/music.

  [1] https://github.com/sleexyz/hylogen

  [2] http://extempore.moso.com.au/

Andrew Sorensen's demo makes me wonder if classical music could be "decompiled" as a series of recursive functions, giving us a clear conceptual explanation of what is happening. Then, we could reverse the process to generate similar music, or explore variations.

There are very few classical pieces written devoid of a narrative.

The ideas "Cyber-physical programming" around extempore seem interesting!

Livecoded visuals/sounds is something i have been doing with a livecoding tool that i develop where a graphical canvas is actually both, the audio spectrum and the visuals, all driven by a single GLSL fragment shader : https://www.fsynth.com

I produced this album with TidalCycles: http://shop.conditional.club/album/risc-chip. Controlled samples and hardware synths (via tidal-midi) from code.

I have been using Tidal for my live show (and more recently composition) for a few years and have played at some pretty big clubs in LDN, LA, etc. It's been a revelation and I will not be going back to DJing or 'controllers' any time soon.

If anyone is in London I will be giving a talk about using Tidal soon at this free event: http://www.musichackspace.org/events/music-hackspace-present...

I'm interested in how you're using it for composition. There are some things I feel I'm missing. I'm not so much interested in creating noise with it; that's never been my thing. But I'd love to see some examples of how you're using it for composing, if you could share.

Feel free to email me jarm at jarm dot is

I will hopefully find time to write something public at some point!

If you get to see someone perform live coded music as I did at EMF 2014 (Yaxu (Alex McLean) it's a blast, watch in real time as the code is edited, glitches out then drops back in, if the coding is projected you can predict where the music is going :) I could not find the EMF show I saw, but this gives a feel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HXcb5_RuNg

Check this out if you are if you are interested in live coding, its a great abstraction for live coding for overtone : https://github.com/ctford/leipzig http://ctford.github.io/klangmeister/composition

Did the title get modded to remove the reference to music? It's a terribly unclear title as it stands.

No, I think it has always been "a language for live-coding pattern". I might agree that it is a bit unclear. Music is the the most common use case, but it can do a lot more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMrv_wEFdqE

Tidal has a MIDI add on which makes playing with MIDI instruments quite fun! I get patterns of notes playing and then fiddle on the knobs of the synths. So much fun :-)

I'll just leave this here... :p

Sonic Pi: http://sonic-pi.net/ On GH: https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi Aerodaynamic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cydH_JAgSfg

Sonic Pi has been gaining a lot of traction recently. The thing I like about Tidal in comparison, is that it's way more suited to creating weirdness.

For beginners(assuming some programming knwoldge), what is the easiest way to improvise electronic music: live-coding ? or or a keyboard based software studio application, like fruity loops ? or are there any others ?

I don't think there's a right answer, but I think it might come down to budget. If you want to pay $1000 for an off-the-shelf drum machine, sequencer, or synth, modern musical hardware is pretty easy to use and you can go far. However, live-coding software is free software and open source. As for ease-of-use, I think it really depends on the person. If you have some programming experience, then a live-coding musical environment might be fairly easy. It's a different set of challenges.

A physical device such as a "groovebox" might be interesting for you, they include sequencing, drum machine and synth in one box, much like teenage engineering's OP-1 (which is expensive and modern). One I'm looking at getting is the Roland MC-505. Some people will say they sound this or that, but listen to some demos people have put on youtube and decide for yourself. Think they go for less than £300, and you can make a whole album on one.

If you have an iPad, GarageBand for IOS is an absolutely incredible start for that kind of thing. Or Korg Gadget, or UVI Beathawk. They act like the physical ones but have more features and cost way less--you've already paid for the hardware.

It's perfect. Just what I wanted.

I've given Sonic PI multiple good tries. I really have. TidalCycles is much more of a natural fit for me (which is an emphasis on rhythm and time manipulation rather than chords/melodies/synths). To each their own. Sonic PI resonates with a lot of people.

this reminds me of Bret Victor's talk, "stop drawing dead fish", which takes a similar concept of live-performance programming and applies it to the world of animated storytelling:

https://vimeo.com/64895205

This seems interesting. I'd like to know if people have used Overtone [0] in Clojure for this and how it worked out.

http://overtone.github.io/

My favorite use of TidalCycles is in the Canute performances: http://canute.lurk.org/

You can find out more about live coding in the performing arts here http://toplap.org

Related question: Are there any nice videos demoing this kind of music artistry in a different genre? I'm thinking of stuff like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY1FSsUV-8c or maybe something with vocal sampling?

I know this sort of goes against the live coding thing, it is it possible to do a hybrid sort of thing where you use frp to manage inputs from sequencers?

Making anything related to music and naming it Tidal (a multi-million dollar music company) is a recipe for a bad time.

It was named long before the music service came out.

This is beautiful and I think haveing tool like that can improve generated music for lounges and also games.

You need a visual interface with knobs. Not text. This guy needs to see more Bret Victor!

https://vimeo.com/36579366

Text is a visual interface, if you look really closely you can see each letter is actually a little picture.

Umm

Can you use text to move a slider?

Yes.

(FWIW I have watched and enjoyed all Bret Victor's videos, and am looking forward to his big reveal. I've also experimented with visual front-ends to tidalcycles, so agree with you to some extent.. But text is really good for describing pattern.)

Slightly unfortunate naming choice maybe, considering the Tidal music streaming service?

This Tidal was around first. The more well known Tidal is what got the 'Cycles' part added to the name I think.

Deleted comment

Another one? So how is this one different than all the languages that do this (like Chuck or Overtone) AND the libs for C++/all other languages that generate audio as well? The original THX sound was generated in C.

I would be inclined to use a language that had more signal processing built in, ie Mathematica:

https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/SoundAndSonific...

https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/SignalProcessin...

How dare they!

There's enough fun in the world already.

That wasn't what was implied. Usually if a project isnt named "Johns treehouse" and instead "X: The Ytinator" you might care if there is a bit of hyperbole or there really is actual scene person who decided to improve upon the current landscape given their breadth of knowledge. As oppose to John who doesnt know much about woodworking but likes creating bullshit with "made by John" carved into it.

More like "How is this news?" but take offense if you wish

You didn't communicate that very well. All I got was that you didn't understand what it was but you sure as hell had an opinion anyway.

If i understand what they are doing then it's not really equivalent as this seems to be a DSL for transforming textual patterns into music, rather than a general purpose music language. While you can dive under the covers it's not required. Getting to this point in Overtone would be some work, so here you can just get started playing with it. Chuck i have less experience with enough to think the same thing applies.

The pedant in me already observes that any programming language is "a DSL for transforming textual patterns into..." but i hope my sense in representing the difference is clear enough.

That's exactly what this is - it's a small DSL that evaluates to create triggers at moments in time. These triggers are then evaluated by an endpoint (like the sampler included with tidal) to make sound.

I'm in a related field (I do a lot of signal processing in Pure Data), and I also keep an eye on the live coding scene. You're absolutely right here in that Tidal isn't about signal processing, it's about a flexible, creative, and expressive way to issue musical commands as text. It isn't so much an audio programming language, as it is a musical programming language.

Other languages such as Chuck, Supercollider, Pd, or Max are much better suited to the signal processing side of things (though there are certainly plenty of pained souls who have done plenty of musical work in these languages).

Edit: I can safely say that if you're planning on getting into live coding, Tidal is the way to go. I wouldn't recommend anything else. There be dragons.

Yes it's for exploring patterns. It's not unique in this (cf supercollider patterns, foxdot, isobar, gibber patterns, ixilang etc) but is fairly unique in its purist focus on pattern.

This gibber? http://gibber.mat.ucsb.edu

(I have yet to run into anyone else that's heard of the thing I linked, and I think it's really awesome.)

Yes! Gibber is indeed ace.

Thanks for explaining its strength succintly

It's in Haskell. That makes it much better than C.

I think you're being downvoted for negativity, but you make a fair point.

The THX logo is a classic of sound design made entirely with code.

Given all the newer langs, it should be easy to do better.

Oddly, this doesn't happen. It's very rare that anyone makes non-toy music with these langs, never mind creating an acknowleged classic.

There may be reasons for this.

Yeah... most musicians (i.e. "creatives") aren't coders. They prefer high-level GUIs (that strangely always look like expensive vintage analogue gear). And most coders aren't musicians.

You're going to really hate this page https://github.com/lvm/awesome-livecoding/blob/master/README...

Wow the bytebeat is fascinating!!

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