Tidal: sounds, control patterns and tempo

This module turns rhythm notation into a playable instrument. The whole task is a short live set — three concurrent Tidal patterns behaving like a kick/percussion/melodic-texture rig in a club or algorave setting, where you shape timbre and arrange the mix in real time rather than pre-composing. Everything here is what a performer actually touches between saving a line and hearing the room respond.

The arc starts supported: with one pattern on d1, split sound into folder and index (see “Separating s and n”) and pitch one-shots into melodic material with note versus n. Then route your first effect through #, leaning on “control patterns combined with the # operator” and the structure-from-the-left rule to understand why swapping operands changes the groove. Next, sweep a low-pass filter with range-scaled sine/saw oscillators (the continuous-oscillator and LFO atoms are your JIT how-tos), add speed for pitch-and-reverse tricks, and convert a target BPM into setcps. Only then go polyphonic: bring up d2 and d3, and rehearse hush, mute, and solo until dropping and restoring layers is reflexive — that reflex is what makes the unsupported capstone a performance instead of a scramble.

Required atoms gate the capstone directly: you cannot write a single line without $, cannot layer FX without # semantics, and cannot arrange three voices without the d1-d9 controls and tempo model. Supporting atoms enrich the practice — the language/engine architecture, the Haskell-level $ treatment, and custom sample loading explain your rig, cut groups tame long samples, and the Strudel effect atoms show the same ideas in the browser for zero-install rehearsal.

Runnable examples

Generated from the context/ instrument corpus by concept (redistributable idioms only). Do not edit — regenerate with gen-module-examples.mjs.

stereo-panning

d1 $ pan (slow 2 sine) # sound "hh*8"

_{tidal-0037 · CC0}

SinOsc s => Pan2 p => dac; -0.7 => p.pan;

_{chuck-0042 · MIT}

reverse-playback

d1 $ sound "bd sn" # speed "-1"

_{tidal-0056 · CC0}