Just to add some context, Strudel is TidalCycles ported from Haskell to JS. IMO, Haskell is a much nicer language for this stuff. Hopefully, now that GHC can output WebAssembly, someone can build a web-based music programming environment around the original TidalCycles instead.

This is pretty incredible to watch. I initially thought she must be pulling some kind of trick to make that look so fluid, but the fact that she is making very small typos and correcting them as she goes make it look very believable. This is really the first time I've watched someone use one of these tools and it feel like a musician using a new kind of instrument.

I've watched a couple of her stuff, it's really inspiring and feels very cosy, like a slice of Internet that lives on its own and creates without being too bothered about the Algorithm™.

The person in that video really has an ear for synthesis. I've spent quite some time watching all the strudel videos and this creator consistently shows the best skill across genres.

Yeah love her stuff. And honestly the voice description is part of the music flow at this point.

I feel like that’s kinda how people imagined navigating whatever cyber domain when the first big cyberpunk novels came out

This was epic, and reminded me of the magic of programming when I first found a video game maker at a wee 11 years old.

Writing code to make music feels so natural to me (a musically inept, but proficient coder) and this breaks down so many barriers.

I wonder how Cursor fares with Strudel so far.

This is one of my all-time favorite YouTube videos, and it's of her coding music - https://youtu.be/iu5rnQkfO6M

combine it with a <details> and <summary> inside the <dd> and a little CSS checkbox toggle for JS-less "show all details"/"hide all details" and it's pure gold.

Most of the languages on the list have not been maintained in decades with many being for functionally extinct if not completely extinct systems. It is not really a list meant to guide you to a language to use, it is more about historical/academic interest.

Is this the one from the hippie(non perjorative) group living off a boat?

If it’s the same, it’s one that if I win the lottery I’d spend my time learning along with this tool from Imogen https://mimugloves.com/

I don’t think I’d ever produce something worth listening to, but if I won the lottery, why would I care beyond my own enjoyment?

Very cool! Found this note interesting:

```

Limitations

I haven't, yet, found a good way to implement filters (low-pass, high-pass, band-pass, etc.). It does not have Fourier transform, and we cannot operate on the frequency domain. However, the moving average can suffice as a simple filter.

```

I wonder if there's a way to implement the FFT using subqueries and OVER/partitioning? That would create a lot of room for some interesting stuff to happen, specifically making it easy/possible to implement filters, compression, reverberation, and other kinds of effects.

Two other primitives that would be valuable to figure out: 1. How to implement FM/phase distortion. You can basically implement a whole universe of physical modeling if you get basic 6 op sine wave primitives right with FM + envelopes. 2. Sampling/resampling - given clickhouse should do quite well with storing raw sample data, being able to sample/resample opens up a whole world of wavetable synthesis algorithms, as well as vocal editing, etc.

Honestly, although the repo's approach is basic, I think the overall approach is wonderful and have wanted to be able to use SQL to write music for a while. I've spent a lot of time writing music in trackers, and being able to use SQL feels like it would be one of the few things that could spiritually be a successor to it. I've looked at other live coding languages, many of which are well built and have been used by talented people to make good music (such as Tidal, Strudel, etc). But all of it seems like a step down in language from SQL. I'd rather have their capabilities accessible from SQL than have to use another language and its limitations just to get those capabilities.

Food for thought -- thanks for the interesting and thoughtful work!

Curious, would the rewrite allow for building on hardware platforms such as the Daisy?

Or maybe it is already possible, to be fair I haven't looked closely.

https://daisy.audio/hardware/, https://github.com/electro-smith/libDaisy

have you figured out a good tool flow for going from music to transcription?

I've used ai.splitter to generate stems, but need to go and identify tones and notes before plotting on to a sheet of music. I'm looking at doing this as a beginning cello student.

you can get the LLM to output max patches in JSON and copy paste directly into max. it was pretty decent at it when I tried and would probably be even better with relevant recent documentation in context.

Oh wow, first I hear of this one, quite interesting! How did you come across it? The vscode extension seems quite neat too, excited to try it out.

I'm curious what you did with it? I spent a little time with ChucK with the Oxford Laptop Orchestra (as was) which was an offshoot from the Princeton one. I was there as a technologist, not a musician. Always had a soft spot but never found myself using it again.

Depending on the source music, there are many aspects of this that normally require a license with a records company or some proxy. Especially the lyrics part. Be careful not to get into very expensive trouble. Just because the LLM can do it, doesn’t mean it’s ok to do it.

The problem I see is: people are not going to use a project that is AI generated for long really, unless they do it just for a one-off task. I'd like to constantly generate new music. I also have ideas based on existing music so I want to adjust this, but do so programmatically, and that seems ... hard.

See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/@Switch-Angel/videos for examples of strudel in action to create trance music.

Sonic Pi is SuperCollider, but using Ruby instead of the default sclang language. Overtone is similar (and possibly originally by the same developer, iirc?) but using Clojure, and is also missing from the list.

Claude code is good at coding and music theory. IMHO, there is not need for a dedicated language.

BTW. I've played with LLM in sound design tasks recently. Vibe coded MCP server for Waldorf Blofeld gave me good results. Sorry, no demo.

ever tried Pd or max?

This sounds sick! I wonder if there's something similar in Seattle.

I can vouch for the tutorial series from Eli Fieldsteel[0] for getting into SuperCollider and audio synthesis in general. If you were ever curious on how to bridge the gap between signal processing and music theory through mathematical operations, I think this is one of the best series out there.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRzsOOiJ_p4&list=PLPYzvS8A_r...