For me, Tidal is a super-fun environment that affords many possibilities and surprises, right from the outset of starting as a beginner. I enjoy the feeling of being able to make changes with intention and the musical surprises that arise from unexpected interactions with functions, misunderstandings and errors. I also like that it’s relatively easy to start making music even with limited experience of different functions and syntax.
“The Magic Words Are Squeamish Ossifrage” is the plain text solution to many cryptographic challenges, a tradition originated in a challenge set by the authors of the RSA encryption algorithm in 1977. It is my first full-length album as QBRNTHSS, the result of more than a year of live performances and rehearsals using TidalCycles and Supercollider as main instruments. It’s published on the Sheffield label Interworld Media in digital download and cassette tape, and aesthetically it’s a mixture of synthetic textures, noisy ambients and broken rhythms.
For me TidalCycles is a compositional tool because it allows me to make the complex music I’ve always dreamed of and do it very quickly, and more importantly, it allows me to perform it by myself in any circumstance. I’m particularly interested in the ability to create complex iterative structures and the flexibility it gives you to manipulate the sound. Sometimes, when I finish writing one of my endless scripts, I’ll run it and spend some time listening to what Tidal comes up with. I’m fascinated by the code’s ability to generate unexpected structures all the time.
Hello, I am ghostchamb3r and this is my Masterclass. 👻 For lack of a better term I produce electronic dance music. I take influences from a variety of genres and as a result I use a variety of production techniques and sound design approaches. When I go to upload my music to Spotify I just tell Spotify that it’s Hard Techno, because sure, why not? I’m pretty sure it’s not actually hard Techno or any of the other genres from the pulldown list. I don’t know what it is. What I do know is that it’s danceable and it hits hard on a club room floor.
Hi, I’m Lucy, and I’m a live coder. In this blog post I’m going to be talking about some of my strategies for using samples and approaches to from-scratch or blank-screen live coded performance. … When I started live coding it felt like blank-screen was the only way. It excited me but it doesn’t excite everyone. I feel that the emphasis on fully from-scratch performances can be a barrier for some people, and when I run workshops I always try to emphasize that while I start from a blank screen, it’s not compulsory. But I do feel that the Algorave/live coding approach of starting with a blank screen, and embracing error is really exciting and necessary - without this forum for experimental risky performances I wouldn’t be able to do what I do.
What I like about live coding with TidalCycles is that I can improvise and change the pattern flexibly per-part basis (connections, d1, d2, d3). It also combines musical and coding ideas at a high level.
There are many things that inspire me.. I generally like the minimalistic, text-based approach to music making, where everything is visible at all times on one screen. When I started making music with an MPC1000, menu-diving was a key part of the process. A similar thing can be said about DAWs like Ableton (and Push), where there are many different UI layers and hidden items. Combining Tidal’s simplistic interface with a terse and nestable syntax, it becomes a powerful tool full of rabbit holes to explore. Also, I like the fact that it is open source and thus hackable + the community around it is really refreshing.
I find the way Tidal allows me to approach music in a structural way fascinating. I like it’s concise but still verbose syntax, especially combined with the mini-syntax. When I make music on my own, I like to start out with simple rhythmic patterns and start to layer them with different versions of themselves (slower & lower / faster & higher / ..). Now apply the MI clouds effect and you can have fun for hours adjusting the parameters! I also like to use a traditional game controller and map the controls to conditional functions or effects in the code. For example, playing a drum pattern twice as fast when I press the ‘A’ button, or adjust the pan according to a joystick. I like the thought that I am programming the functionality of a game live, while I am also playing it.
I have no background in computer science, but I find the syntax [of Tidal] suprisingly intuitive. Also, by comparison with SuperCollider, you can get a lot of music going with very little typing.
