Summer contributor: Saachi Kaup on Mandala patterns

The Summer of Haskell is a programme funded via the Haskell Foundation, supporting students and other newcomers with a stipend and mentorship to make their first open source contributions to the Haskell ecosystem. Haskell is a pure functional programming language, which I have enjoyed working with for many years, including making the TidalCycles language for live coding with algorithmic patterns. Lets just say Haskell is a really great language for thinking deeply about representations.

This year I’m happy to mentor computer science student Saachi Kaup, who will be looking into representing Mandala patterns with Haskell, integrated with TidalCycles for visualising musical patterns (or perhaps, sonifying visual mandala patterns). In her proposal, Saachi pointed out that visualisations of TidalCycles patterns tend to be linear, and it will be interesting to see what happens when you take a more cyclic approach, inspired by this fine Indian tradition. This might well connect well with the previous Summer project I mentored by Aravind Mohandas, who worked on representing South Indian Konnakol rhythms. Saachi is just getting started, but already talking about taking a turtle graphics approach, inspired by the venerable logo. I’m looking forward to seeing and working with the results!