I’ve been working on the TidalCycles live coding environment well over a decade now, and still am (exciting rewrite in the works!). It’s designed for live coding music with code, based on ideas of patterns inspired by systems like the Bol Processor. By now it has a vibrant, worldwide community of practitioners and contributors behind it. At the start of 2022 I tried porting its representation of patterns from Haskell to Javascript, and quietly shared it as free/open source software on the github platform. Within a week or two Felix Roos had somehow discovered it, and quickly turned it into a working live coding system. After over a year of intensive development, it’s already full of exciting features, and nearing the 1.0.0 milestone release!
Here it is in action, with a relatively simple rhythmic pattern:
You can explore more, including interactive documentation, on the official website: https://strudel.tidalcycles.org/
Felix and I documented the process and progress so far in a paper accepted for the 7th International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC), which took place in Utrecht last month. You can read the full paper here (free/open access), and see the related presentation from Felix here.
It’s been really interesting working on Strudel, and especially nice to start using it, including on a networked robot live choreography project with Kate Sicchio – more on that soon.
I’ll finish up with a strudel tune from Felix Roos:
Roos, Felix, and Alex McLean. 2023. “Strudel: Live Coding Patterns on the Web.” In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Live Coding. Utrecht, Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7842142.
