Strudel.cc | David Märzendorfer

Intro

A while back I heard of strudel.cc. It is a rendition of TidalCycles in JavaScript that allows one to combine coding and audio snythesis to make some neat beats. Furthermore, one can put some funky visuals on top with hydra. Strudel is often used for Algoraves were the audio performance is live coded!

I wanted to give it a shot so I followed along this workshop by Side-Gallery. The written workshop can be found here.

I am only scratching the surface with it but I really like how simple it is and how you dont need that much music knolwedge to make something. So have a listen and I encourage everyone to give it a try, it is quite fun <3

My little beats can also be found and viewed in the strudel REPL.

First sounds

For starters I just created a simple beat using the default drum machine and casio sample of strudel.

This one is also quite simple, but I recommend stereo audio for the full experience ;) Oh and by the way, feel free to change some numbers and stuff to try it out yourself! You can use "Ctrl+Enter" to play, and "Ctrl+." to stop in the editor :)

It also supports visualisations for the notes and rhythm!

More interesting tunes

And it is really easy to create some rather complex rhythms :)

Here I used a few more samples and played around with volume and speed as well some randomness for more variation.

Besides the default samples and sound banks you can also modulate sounds with just sine waves! I have not done it in my samples very often but you can also define frequencies and notes instead of just using the default sounds.

Final product

This is my last sample of the workshop, it is not the best but I just tried out some more features. You can also integrate device sensors into the music to make it interactive (but it only works on mobile) and I also gave hydra visuals a quick try. One other thing that I love is the integration of a really neat API, namely Shabda. It allows you to quickly and easily search for samples on the web and integrate them into your track. The samples can be pretty much anything, be it text to speech or instruments.