How to start making music with TidalCycles

Purpose/Overview

Think about this like a guitar lesson. I'm going to tell you about how the instrument works, how to tune it, and how to make a few chords, and at the end you will leave with a working copy of the instrument and the ability to make sound on it.

What is tidalcycles?

Tidalcycles is an instrument for making music that is made out of code. Instead of strings, keys or reeds, it uses code to create sound. Performers create and execute lines of code to bring their musical ideas to life. In most instruments, the idea of the music (the score, or chord chart, or memory) is separate from the music (the sound and performance). In tidal, they are unified. You express the idea to tidal and immediately hear the result. This can make tidal more accessible than other instruments and allow it to work in ways that are very different than other instruments. Tidal was designed to be used live but it also makes a great studio tool!

Tidalcycles is one of many tools created for making live algorithmic music. Here are some other great ones:

• Sonic Pi
• Orca
• Foxdot
• Gibber

What is algorave?

Algorave is an international community of musicians and the name given to live performances of music made using algorithms. From the toplap website:

Algoraves are all about dancing to algorithms, including live coding as well as other approaches to controlling and performing with generative music.

Algoravers strive to be transparent in exposing the inner workings of their music by projecting the code so the crowd can see it as it is developed. Algoravers also strive to be an intentional community, valuing diversity, respect for other communities, collapsing heirarchies, being free culture unassociated with institutions. The full Algorave community guidelines are here

Algorave isn't limited to music but also often includes visual artist who use code to create synthesized animations Some visual livecoding tools:

• hydra
• cyril

Some artists working in this community whose work I particularly enjoy:

• miri kat
• heavy lifting
• kindohm
• yaxu
• joe beedles

Join the community

If you need any help getting started there is a very active online community of algoravers. Here are some places you can get in touch:

• Lurk Chat -- A multichannel chat full of people using all kinds of livecoding tools. This is a great tool for getting immidiate help.
• Toplap Forum -- A forum for livecoders. A great place to have longer conversations about the music and the instruments.

Installing Tidal

Installing tidal is the most complicated part of using it. We will do it all together. Tidal is installed in 3 parts.

The Anatomy of the Instrument

1. Supercollider and SuperDirt

   • Supercollider is a language and engine for making synthesizers and doing audio processing. It is the engine that makes Tidal make sound.
   • SuperDirt is software written for supercollider that converts Tidal patterns into sounds.

2. Tidal

   • Tidal is the language that you use to express musical ideas in patterns. It sends data to superdirt to make sounds. It can also receive data from superdirt to make patterns react to the outside world. (ex. a midi controller)

3. A text editor with a plugin for tidalcycles

   • A text editor with a special plugin is required to evaluate the tidalcycles code live. This is the interface that you will use to make music with tidal.
   • Many good editors with plugins exist (Atom, VSCode, emacs, vim). We will use atom today.

Installation Steps

We will follow along with the instructions here: install instructions select your operating system from the list and follow along.

When you are done, we will do a few more things together to make it easier for you to make music with tidal. The steps below will make it easy for you to use custom sounds and samples in tidal, and record midi and audio without having to edit more code.

1. Open supercollider

2. Edit the startup file ("startup.scd") to point at the file called "tidal-startup.scd" in the directory where you downloaded this starter project.

   • add the following line: load(<PATH_TO_YOUR_TIDAL_STARTER_PROJECT>/tidal-starter-project/tidal-startup.scd);

3. Edit the "tidal-startup.scd" file and correct the paths that specify the location of the "samples" directory

   • change the directory in this line: ~dirt.loadSoundFiles("<PATH_TO_YOUR_TIDAL_STARTER_PROJECT>/tidal-starter-project/samples/*");

4. Edit the "tidal-startup.scd" file and correct the paths that specify the location of the "synths" directory

   • change the directory in this line: ~dirt.loadSynthDefs("<PATH_TO_YOUR_TIDAL_STARTER_PROJECT>/tidal-starter-project/synths/");

5. (Optional) Edit the "tidal-startup.scd" file and specify your midi device

   • change this line to point at your midi device: ~midiOutput = MIDIOut.newByName("Virtual Raw MIDI 2-0","VirMIDI 2-0");

Running Tidal

1. Launch supercollider

2. Launch Atom and open the tidal template project folder from the File menu.

3. Start editing a .tidal file and press control+enter on a line. For now open one of the tutorial files in the "songs" directory.