tidalcycles is a programming language that allows you to make music. There’s a great series of tutorials on the tidalcycles website.
I also watched this video by Dan Gorelick, who’s teaching an online class about it.
I also figured out that in the past Studio Pointer has worked with SuperCollider, which is the underlying software that actually creates and plays the sound. Here’s some stuff they made:
- https://gitlab.com/pointerstudio/sccore
- https://gitlab.com/pointerstudio/sccore/-/blob/master/src/init.scd?ref_type=heads
- https://gitlab.com/pointerstudio/mindfulnessmachine
Apart from that there’s a book written about live programming in general. I think I quite resonate with the whole subculture because normally I spend a lot of time programming something before it works, and with live coding you have instant feedback. In a way it’s a lot closer to using traditional design software, where you can instantly see your changes, and make adjustments and make changes based on that etc, etc.
link book
Here are some notes I took on the basics of Tidalcycles.
-- "" is a cycle, the more steps (e.g. kick, snare) you add, the more they get pushed together to fit within cycle.
d1 $ sound "kick snare"
d1 $ sound "kick snare kick snare"
-- s shorthand --
-- sound = the same as s
d1 $ s "kick snare"
-- SELECTING NUMBERS --
-- kick is just a folder with samples of kicks, doing this selects the 3rd kick sample
d1 $ s "kick:2"
hush
-- n notation --
-- putting n "" # selects different numbers
d1 $ n "3 2 4 5" # s "kick"
-- it's the same as this
d1 $ s "kick:3 kick:2 kick:4 kick:5"
-- GAPS --
-- putting n "a ~ b c d" creates a gap
d1 $ n "3 ~ 4 5" # s "kick"
-- putting n "a ~ b c d" creates a gap
d1 $ n "3 ~ 4 5" # s "kick"
-- SUBSEQUENCE --
-- putting [ ] you can put a sequence in a step.
d1 $ n "3 5 [4 4] 5" # s "kick"
-- you can also put subsequences inside of subsequences
d1 $ n "3 5 [4 [7 7]] 5" # s "kick"