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 recently bodged together a board that would drive FastLED programs parameterized by the control voltages that come off a eurorack, it was really neat and straightforward because you have some really good clock sources to sync to
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!
Strudel doesn't have all of the advanced features of TidalCycles. It really just depends on what you need. Strudel is easier to get started with, and definitely more visual/immediate, but TidalCycles has the full power of Haskell, longer history, and more advanced tooling. Either way, it's really nice to see people getting more involved in programmatic music, regardless of which tool they use. :)
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
Love Strudel, trying to learn it but inevitably you also need some musical foundation. It's a fascinating blend of specialties. Also I found AI is complete garbage at generating Strudel.
Here is my weak attempt at Beethoven:
I've been following this project with great interest.
Quite possibly one of the most interesting things is just how competent the REPL is. It does some things that no other programming environment does in a prompt, all centered around real-time processing:
- All code in the prompt is being constantly evaluated
- What parts of expressions are currently in use are highlighted
- Visualization widgets sit side-by-side with the code
That last one is playfully rendered as pseudo-TUI "graphics", but is also presented with no borders or chrome around it. That's in sharp contrast to notebooks like Jypyter or Mathematica. They use minimal screen real-estate which also minimizes scrolling. If you look at videos of using this live, the ability to navigate the REPL quickly is crucial for performances.
So it's a lot like a kind of step-wise debugger, only more minimalist and moving at the (slow) speed of the music.
Ever since seeing Strudel, I've wondered what various programming sandboxes would be like if they could visually demonstrate operations in slow-motion.
Does anyone know if it's possible to run Strudel code on VS Code (or NeoVim)? Tidle Cycles has add-ons where I can play/stop updated code or part of code with ctrl(cmd)-. and ctrl(cmd)-space. I mean, one of Strudel strong point is the browser based rich visualization, but I just want to edit JS code with my favorite editor.
Even though Algorave is quite new, everyone who ever touched .mod/.s3m/.xm/.it can fell young again haha.
DJ_Dave live events are the best illustration for all of it. If you love electronic music, ever touched any generative art, and know basic coding this is for you.
Strudel is dope and a ton of fun, but every single piece of its interface seems determined to confuse people who already know music theory and composition.
That's not really a point against it, it's a great tool and it's a ton of fun, but I wish there was a way to use it that at least kind of sort of mapped back to traditional music notation, especially rhythm notation.
It would be unergonomic, if not painful, to use a western classical approach to rhythm in a programming environment. Alex McLean, the main author of Tidal/Strudel, is very much into Indian classical, and this is reflected in the approach to rhythm. IMO this is an good choice, and people who know music theory and composition should feel right at home, assuming we're talking about the right theory.
When it comes to pitch (and I guess we agree on this) Strudel is firmly on the western traditional side. It generally assumes 12-tone equal temperament, uses ABC notation, has built-in facilities to express chords using their classical names...
Meanwhile I'm over here programming music where I express all frequencies as fractions or monzos. I find this better suited to a music programming environment, but this might be more personal.
Strudel is my favorite music coding environment. I mostly play on acoustic instruments but coding music has been really helpful as I try to learn music theory. Being able to just play in the browser without setup helps me focus on the music and less on fiddling with the tool. And it supports vim key bindings!
Strudel was moved to codeberg for ethical reasons. Annoying to see so many people forking it back to github in order to make yet another LLM interface.
Weird. My android phone is 3+ years old and was not a flagship when I got it. It had a little problem with stuttering on more complex examples. It sounded like it was running out of things that can play at the same time, but scrolling was still smooth. It didn't feel like it was pinning my phone's cpu.
On my laptop, it didn't break a sweat with firefox and pipewire.
Are you sure it's not a config issue?
I can't tell, things like BespokeSynth are running ok with alsa or jack. I got the rt kernel, made a few things to audio priority, fiddled with governors, but no luck. Let's say that it happens quite quickly with the Stitch Angel fast trance example "the key needs to be G" supersaw synth.
Whereas when played separately it would be an referred to as an arpeggio. But in harmony we might still refer to it as a chord, as in saying, arpeggiate the C# minor (chord) to start moonlight sonata.
This might better be described as arpeggiating C#m second inversion or even C#m/G# in the right over C# in the left...
This is getting possibly-weird but you could call it an arpeggiation of G#sus4(#5)/C#
I think chords at least three notes played at once, with the exception of maybe power chords. Using your definition, every piece with two or more notes has chords :)
As per my knowledge, and as per Britannica, a chord actually uses three or more notes. A two note structure is called a diad, which implies a bit of confusion in the term "power chord" (written as 5, as in G5, which == G D == 1 5).. as it is not by definition a chord but a diad.
This may be a pedantic clarification, but that is the definition
TBH "definition" depends on the theory from which you're looking at the notes.
In the eyes of the Common Practice two simultaneous notes are not chords; in rock they most definitely are; in EDM you don't even care, since timbre is all that matters; in jazz you'd say "it depends" (e.g. might even be a triad with an omitted 5th... depending on context!)
Strudel is a great tool and is helping me to make EDM from scratch. There are good tutorials and music that is easy to get started or to make something really interesting.
but DAWs plugins and instruments are just like code but with an GUI interface to mess with. don't get me wrong, PureData freedom is astonishing but one can also go quite far with esoteric sequencers or modulation in DAWs found out there
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.
> How to Synthesize a House Loop[0]
[0]: https://loopmaster.xyz/tutorials/how-to-synthesize-a-house-l...
<pre> const SCALE = 'C#:minor' const CPM = 56 const SOUND = 'piano'
$: arrange( [4, n("<-7, 0>.25")], [4, n("<-8, -1>.25")],
).sound(SOUND) .scale(SCALE) .cpm(CPM);$: arrange( [8, n("4 7 9")],
).sound(SOUND) .scale(SCALE) .cpm(CPM);</pre>
Strudel docs leave something to be desired as well.
What I've found to be the most useful so far is to ask an LLM to make a line of whatever: a beat, a synth, etc., tweak it, then layer it.
It gives a really good sense of how to architect a song file, which is missing from the little snippets in the strudel docs
Quite possibly one of the most interesting things is just how competent the REPL is. It does some things that no other programming environment does in a prompt, all centered around real-time processing:
- All code in the prompt is being constantly evaluated - What parts of expressions are currently in use are highlighted - Visualization widgets sit side-by-side with the code
That last one is playfully rendered as pseudo-TUI "graphics", but is also presented with no borders or chrome around it. That's in sharp contrast to notebooks like Jypyter or Mathematica. They use minimal screen real-estate which also minimizes scrolling. If you look at videos of using this live, the ability to navigate the REPL quickly is crucial for performances.
So it's a lot like a kind of step-wise debugger, only more minimalist and moving at the (slow) speed of the music.
Ever since seeing Strudel, I've wondered what various programming sandboxes would be like if they could visually demonstrate operations in slow-motion.
She's using a live computational notebook as an instrument.
NeoVim: https://github.com/gruvw/strudel.nvim
DJ_Dave live events are the best illustration for all of it. If you love electronic music, ever touched any generative art, and know basic coding this is for you.
That's not really a point against it, it's a great tool and it's a ton of fun, but I wish there was a way to use it that at least kind of sort of mapped back to traditional music notation, especially rhythm notation.
When it comes to pitch (and I guess we agree on this) Strudel is firmly on the western traditional side. It generally assumes 12-tone equal temperament, uses ABC notation, has built-in facilities to express chords using their classical names...
Meanwhile I'm over here programming music where I express all frequencies as fractions or monzos. I find this better suited to a music programming environment, but this might be more personal.
https://strudel.cc/#CnNldGNwbSg3Mi8yKQoKbGV0IGJhc3MgPSBub3Rl...
I find I get close to something ready to perform... but then the webapp starts struggling and I find myself back at the drawing board.
I get the sense I'm not using it right and making the DSP work much harder than it needs to :P
It is usually worth trying the dev version at: https://warm.strudel.cc/
although I think that's close to the live version at the moment.
A nitpick: Isn't the below statement wrong? I thought "RolandTR909" was the name of the soundbank which is used for both bd and sd?
"bd is bass drum (also called kick-drums), sd is snare drum. RolandTR909 is the name of the sound."
But this is way too taxing for my linux boxes that are ending stuttering quite badly sometimes. Are you all using macs or something?
Chromium is better at it than Firefox though.
Maybe this 5800X3D needs a buff up...
Maybe the issue is you touched too much?
A 5800X3D is freaking power house. It's not a hardware issue. You can run "fast trance" on a laptop twice the age of your CPU.
note("c4 e4 g4 c5").sound("triangle")
I think OP's point is that the very definition of a chord is a bunch of notes played at the same time.
This might better be described as arpeggiating C#m second inversion or even C#m/G# in the right over C# in the left...
This is getting possibly-weird but you could call it an arpeggiation of G#sus4(#5)/C#
https://www.britannica.com/art/chord-music
This may be a pedantic clarification, but that is the definition
In the eyes of the Common Practice two simultaneous notes are not chords; in rock they most definitely are; in EDM you don't even care, since timbre is all that matters; in jazz you'd say "it depends" (e.g. might even be a triad with an omitted 5th... depending on context!)
Music theory is too post-hoc.
https://strudel.cc/#Cm5vdGUoImM0IGU0IGc0IGM1Iikuc291bmQoInRy...
This resource is very helpful
but DAWs plugins and instruments are just like code but with an GUI interface to mess with. don't get me wrong, PureData freedom is astonishing but one can also go quite far with esoteric sequencers or modulation in DAWs found out there
[0] https://100r.co/site/orca.html [1] https://stochas.org/ [2] https://cardinal.kx.studio/