Livestream: TidalCycles – growing a language for algorithmic pattern

Thursday 20th May 6pm UK / 7pm Berlin / 10am LA / 1pm NYC

In this livestreamed interview, Alex McLean retraces the history and intent that prompted him to develop TidalCycles alongside ‘Algorave’ live performance events, contributing to establish Live Coding as an art discipline.

 Alex started TidalCycles project for exploring musical patterns in 2009, and it is now a healthy free/open-source software project and among the most well-known live coding environments for music.

TidalCycles represents musical patterns as a function of time, making them easy to make, combine and transform. It is generally partnered with the SuperDirt hybrid synthesiser/sampler, created by Julian Rohrhuber using SuperCollider. 

Culturally, TidalCycles is tightly linked to Algorave, a movement created by Alex McLean and Nick Collins in 2011, where musicians and VJs make algorithms to dance to.

Where to watch – 

 

Facebook –  https://www.facebook.com/musichackspace/

Overview of speaker

Alex McLean is a musician and researcher based in Sheffield UK. As well as working on TidalCycles, he also researches algorithmic patterns in ancient weaving, as part of the PENELOPE project based in Deutsches Museum, Munich. He has organised hundreds of events in the digital arts, including the annual AlgoMech festival of Algorithmic and Mechanical Movement. Alex co-founded the international conferences on live coding and live interfaces, and co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music. As live coder has performed worldwide, including Sonar, No Bounds, Ars Electronica, Bluedot and Glastonbury festivals.

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Build a web assembly synthesiser with iPlug 2

Learn to use iPlug2 C++ audio plugin framework to create a synthesiser that runs on the web.

iPlug2 is a new C++ framework that allows you to build cross-platform audio plug-ins, using minimal code. One of the exciting features of iPlug2 is that it lets you turn your plug-in into a web page that anyone can use without a DAW (see for example https://virtualcz.io). In this workshop participants will learn how to build a web based synthesiser using cloud based tools, and publish it to a GitHub pages website. We will look at some basic DSP in order to customise the sound of the synthesiser and we will also customise the user interface. The same project builds native audio plug-ins, although in the workshop we will focus on the web version.

Note from Oli: Even though the workshop might use lots of unfamiliar technologies, iPlug2 is designed to be simple to use and has many of the more confusing aspects of cross platform programming solved for you already. Don’t worry if the technology sounds scary, everyone should be able to build a custom synthesiser using the example projects and workflow.

Requirements

Useful links


About the workshop leader

Oli Larkin is an audio software developer and music technologist with over 15 years of experience developing plug-ins and plug-in frameworks. He has released his own software products and has collaborated with companies such as Roli, Arturia, Focusrite and Ableton. For many years he worked in academia, supporting audio research and sound art projects with his programming skills. Nowadays Oli is working as a freelancer, as well as focusing on his open source projects such as iPlug2

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