I shed an actual tear. I dreamed of days like this. I got close, building a small language for generating generic music, but with decay, sawtooth and stuff? It's a functional DAW.
I made Lambda Musika[0][1] a long time ago and its elevator pitch is literally "Lambda Musika, the functional DAW" (as in functional programming).
Check the teal button at the bottom for other examples!
I don't use it that much anymore (Strudel's language is truly expressive) but I still reach for it when I want to do sound design, since Strudel is more like a sequencer (where Lambda Musika lacks).
That's absolutely sick. I love seeing a full arrangement like this as opposed to destructive live coding--that's cool too, but I don't really vibe with it as a workflow. Definitely taking some inspiration from this.
I found that annoying on the editor, but if used on a 2nd screen to build graphics programmatically (fractals, etc), or via an external port to drive RGB LEDs arrays or matrices, results could be spectacular. Imagine fractals driven by music or a giant spectrum analyzer made of LED strips.
I've run across more and more strudel musicians (developers?) doing a kind of live coding performance art and posting clips on tiktok and reels. It's really entertaining to watch. I've been meaning to dabble in it.
I went to a basement party/rave recently where the DJ was live-coding strudel, was incredibly cool to see in person. people would watch them type out new lines in anticipation of a beat drop
Pretty cool to see this post, I had no idea where to find more info about it!
Algorave definitely seems to be having a moment! I know the scene has been around for a while (live chiptune shows have been a thing for years), but it seems like the Strudel-specific live coding shows are rapidly becoming popular. I love to see it. As someone who likes both programming and music, it's awesome to see people mix both and get fantastic results.
I've been seeing a few links to Strudel recently so I went digging to see how old the project is - looks like it launched in April 2022 https://loophole-letters.vercel.app/strudel
IIRC, that team are also (now) live-music-coding veterans, which in turn has informed how Strudel is built. It's not just a project that does stuff, it's a pretty well crafted instrument that is ideal for these performances.
As an engineer, I love letting the requirements shape the solution, but this is just on a whole other level.
Have you taken a look at how to install the Haskell variant? It's a full-on recipe, or a docker container. I'd take a desktop application over a website any day, but that was not on the menu. It was an SPA vs a devops exercise. Of course the SPA wins.
There's also a neovim plugin for those who want to play around with this locally https://github.com/gruvw/strudel.nvim ; it essentially launches strudel in a browser but synchronizes the strudel and nvim editors.
Is there a way (like a CSS rule or something similar) that when you look at the main strudel window, it only shows the piano rolls, punch cards, sliders, etc - but not the code?
Maybe with just the comments? This would be killer, since I have dual displays, and on one I can just focus on the code, the other one can have all the visual stuff.
I'm using this plugin, but having the code twice distracts me a lot (but I prefer the original neovim instead the integrated vim mode inside strudel).
I've only just started playing around with it, so I don't know enough about it unfortunately. You could open an issue against the repo; the plugin owner might be able to answer your question.
A slightly older Switch Angel trance video is how I learned about Strudel/TidalCycles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWXCCBsOMSg. Her narration over top makes it the perfect trance track. "More chaos brings more power. More power brings more control." I desperately want a clean sample of that.
Exact same here. I watched that video about ten times in a row.
I learned it's more important to know how the big sound pieces fit together and what you can do by tweaking them. Have many, many different versions of the big pieces doesn't really matter.
I also came away wishing that Bitwig had a strudel mode. Every time anyone does anything in the grid, they'd be better off with a strudel equivalent. I think.
this is awesome. The only code instruction video instructions that I have watched that doubled as a song. At first I thought it was the Euro dance hall lyrics and then I realized it was actually the code instructions.
This is an excellent example. It also highlights how if I tried this it would sound terrible as I lack have vocabulary to describe what I want, and how that relates to the code.
Yeah, thanks for both posts. I love the narration with the live coding (like a conversation with voice and code). If I can get to that level, I'll die a happy man.
I was just talking to JChris Anderson about Strudel last week, he forked it, adding "snaps" where users can snapshot their work allowing for the creation of multi-layered songs, added a "vibe" tab so anyone can easily update the code with pompts, and a few other changes.
Allow me to use this post to give big kudos to the maintainers of Strudel for having put together a brilliant set of official docs. I found them incredibly well put together and hence really useful to learn. I have played around with Strudel many evenings and I am always amazed about how intuitive Strudel is to create beats and sounds, to the point that I prefer to create music in Strudel over the established DAW software. I would love for there to be a good bridge between producing sounds and beats with Strudel code and structurering and mastering an entire track. This is missing in Strudel since it’s clearly build for a live coding environment. Any tips from users about ways or tools to make this bridge are always welcome!
I was trying to make it automatically randomly choose between the normal speed and twice speed after a long time. I think appending
.fast(chooseCycles(1, 2).slow(128))
at the very end does it. But I'm not actually sure. Would a strudel user mind informing me how this is done? Also, I was hoping to make it automatically shift the key, but I couldn't figure it out.
Kind of - that's switching between a fast version and a slow version of the track though if that makes sense, rather than changing the global tempo, so you'll get discontinuities in the music.
You can change the global tempo with something like
Readit News
I made Lambda Musika[0][1] a long time ago and its elevator pitch is literally "Lambda Musika, the functional DAW" (as in functional programming).
Check the teal button at the bottom for other examples!
I don't use it that much anymore (Strudel's language is truly expressive) but I still reach for it when I want to do sound design, since Strudel is more like a sequencer (where Lambda Musika lacks).
[0] https://lambda.cuesta.dev/
[1] https://github.com/alvaro-cuesta/lambda-musika
Also this music brings really good vibes!
I get more motivated when I can see it working directly and change some code here and there!
Thanks for sharing.
SwitchAngel always makes their songs live so I never got it, but now I understand.
Pretty cool to see this post, I had no idea where to find more info about it!
I wrote a whole album of material about 10 years ago with it, just remastered/re-released it. It's a fun way to write music while on an airplane!
It came out of the same team as Tidal Cycles, a Haskell live-coding music tool which was first released around 2009. https://tidalcycles.org/docs/around_tidal/tidal_history/
Edit: oh right! Also the toplap documentary from 2005 has some actual video of early live coding performances from this community. https://archive.org/details/toplap-documentary
As an engineer, I love letting the requirements shape the solution, but this is just on a whole other level.
Everything is becoming js because everything is becoming js.
Javascript runs on ~70% of all devices worldwide.
EDIT: fixed link to not have trailing semicolon.
Maybe with just the comments? This would be killer, since I have dual displays, and on one I can just focus on the code, the other one can have all the visual stuff.
I'm using this plugin, but having the code twice distracts me a lot (but I prefer the original neovim instead the integrated vim mode inside strudel).
Thanks in advance!
Note that there is also a feature to inject your own custom CSS into the page.
You can also run in headless mode to not launch the browser window. Hope it helps :)
.cm-line span { outline: none !important; color: transparent; background: transparent !important; }
Now with no added punctuation!
Coding Trance Music from Scratch (Again) [video]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iu5rnQkfO6M
It´s a well done programming and music performance
I learned it's more important to know how the big sound pieces fit together and what you can do by tweaking them. Have many, many different versions of the big pieces doesn't really matter.
I also came away wishing that Bitwig had a strudel mode. Every time anyone does anything in the grid, they'd be better off with a strudel equivalent. I think.
Edit: it looks like she has a filter on. I'm an audio noob so I can't tell.
https://youtu.be/iJUNznsc4JI?t=168
She did a lot of live EDM parties during the peak Mallorca et al party island times.
https://strudel.cc/
She is using https://strudel.cc/
Here's the fork on GitHub: https://github.com/VibesDIY/strudel
Here's a preview of what it would look like when merged: https://strudel.use-vibes.com/
Here he is playing around with the preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oJhnkWDafM
Step 1: https://strudel.cc/workshop/getting-started/ . Click play on coastline" @by eddyflux
Step 2: Listen for a while
Step 3: setcps(.75) -> setcps(1.5)
Step 4: Listen :)
That is the extent of my strudel knowledge, but damn this is cool.
.fast(chooseCycles(1, 2).slow(128))
at the very end does it. But I'm not actually sure. Would a strudel user mind informing me how this is done? Also, I was hoping to make it automatically shift the key, but I couldn't figure it out.
You can change the global tempo with something like
.cps("[0.75|1.75]")
and make it happen less often like
.cps("[0.75|1.75]/8")
uBlock/uMatrix perhaps? At least that was for me the issue on Firefox.