Tidal and Texture

Tidal is a pattern language for live music improvisation, and Texture is a prototype visual front end for it.

Both are currently being prepared for proper release.

Subscribe to the tidal mailing list if you want to get early access and/or help out with porting and packaging:

Tidal installation

A work in progress — please join the mailing list and ask questions when you get stuck.

With the Haskell Platform installed, getting tidal should be a case of typing the following from the commandline:

cabal update
cabal install tidal

The rest all needs to be documented but in brief involves:

  • Get netclock server running in supercollider
  • Get datadirt running with a collection of samples such as this one, as a subdirectory called samples in its working directory
  • Get emacs running with the tidal mode
  • Open a buffer called something like test.tidal and paste in the following:

    let ntp = "127.0.0.1"
    let me = "127.0.0.1"
    dd <- datadirtStream me ntp "dd1"
    dd $ sound "bd ~ ~ ~ sn ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ bd ~ sn ~ ~ ~"
  • Send each line in turn to tidal with ^C^C

Let me know if you get stuck or even better, manage to make any noise!

Tidal tech demo

Texture tech demo

8 Responses to “Tidal and Texture”

  1. [...] Source coming soon here… [...]

  2. Duncan says:

    This work is really great, I’m going to try installing it right now!

  3. Duncan says:

    Step 1: 403 Forbidden for datadirt :(

  4. Alex says:

    Oops, fixed..

  5. Duncan says:

    Great, thanks :) – BTW, what do you run this on? I started installing on OSX Lion, but Haskell itself seems all messed up for that. I see datadirt has a Debian binary, probably I should go with that?

  6. Alex says:

    Yes I’m using Debian, it looks like the haskell platform works on a mac: http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/mac.html

    I still need to fix darcs.slab.org, sorry.. I’m a bad free software citizen :/

  7. Duncan says:

    Hiya, I’ve gone back to trying OSX after Linux turned into a combinatorial explosion of sound configuration complexity! Also, turned out Haskell was only messed up on Lion because someone had submitted some broken stuff to the repository. Tidal installs fine, but I don’t think datadirt is going to work though…

  8. Duncan says:

    p.s. Thanks for putting the netclock and tidal emacs stuff up, I’ll take a look back on Debian tomorrow. Cheers, :D

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