Strudel
Write patterns in JavaScript and hear them immediately in your browser. Strudel brings the TidalCycles way of thinking to the web, with no installation standing between you and the next pattern.
Programming - Live Code
Product information
Overview
Strudel turns your browser into a musical instrument where the sequencer is code and changing the program is part of the performance. Write a pattern, hit play, modify it while it runs and listen as a few innocent characters slowly become an entire track. Initiated by Alex McLean and Felix Roos in 2022, Strudel brings the pattern language of TidalCycles into JavaScript and the browser. No Haskell setup is required to start making noise. One tab is enough. Your other 47 tabs can stay open.
Code While It Plays
Strudel is built around live coding. Patterns keep running while their code is edited and evaluated, so composition becomes a continuous conversation between typing and listening. Rhythms can be stretched, repeated, transformed, randomized and layered without stopping the music to rearrange a timeline. The REPL even highlights parts of the pattern as they generate events, giving the code a visual pulse while it plays. It is programming with unusually immediate feedback. Your function works and suddenly there is a kick drum.
The Gateway Strudel
One of Strudel's biggest tricks is simply being there when curiosity strikes. Open the website, follow the interactive tutorial and you can be manipulating patterns before a traditional music environment would have finished asking where you want it installed. That low barrier has made it a popular entry point into live coding, including among musicians who found TidalCycles harder to approach. Of course, easy to start does not mean easy to escape. Several users report opening Strudel for a quick experiment and resurfacing considerably later.
Why Strudel
The name is not just the result of developers getting hungry. TidalCycles already had an aquatic name, while another related implementation was called Vortex. Felix Roos noticed that Apfelstrudel could amusingly lead back to the idea of an apple vortex, and the JavaScript incarnation found its name. It is strangely appropriate. Strudel is built around cycles, nested patterns and transformations that keep folding back into themselves. Also, naming a live coding environment after pastry is objectively more memorable than JavaScript Algorithmic Pattern Environment.