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Tidal-vis

Tidal-vis is a tool made by Alex McLean to visualize Tidal patterns. This package allows several things:

  • OSC messages sent to SuperCollider to be dynamicly rendered in realtime with a separate window. Demo of realtime visualisation.
  • Colour patterns to be rendered as PDF or SVG files. See Examples.hs in the GitHub repository for more help.
  • Colour patterns to be rendered to be rendered dynamicly in separate window. See CycleAnimation.hs for more. Demo.

Setup tidal-vis​

  1. Comment out any existing lines in BootTidal.hs that begin with tidal <- startTidal.

  2. Add the following lines to BootTidal.hs:

 -- Target and shape for pattern visualizing.
 patternTarget = Target { oName = "Pattern handler", oAddress = "127.0.0.1", oPort = 5050, oBusPort = Nothing, oLatency = 0.02, oWindow = Nothing, oSchedule = Pre BundleStamp, oHandshake = False }
 patternShape = OSC "/trigger/something" $ Named {requiredArgs = []}

 -- Target for playing music via SuperCollider.
 musicTarget = superdirtTarget { oLatency = 0.1, oAddress = "127.0.0.1", oPort = 57120 }

 config = defaultConfig {cFrameTimespan = 1/20}

 -- Send pattern as OSC both to SuperCollider and to tidal-vis.
 tidal <- startStream config [(musicTarget, [superdirtShape]), (patternTarget, [patternShape])]

 -- Send pattern as OSC to SuperCollider only.
 -- tidal <- startTidal musicTarget config
  1. Install tidal-vis and run:
 cabal update
 cabal install tidal-vis
 tidal-vis
  1. Eval your Tidal code.

Learn more​

To learn more about tidal-vis, head to the GitHub repository of the project.

info

For a different approach to visualizing Tidal patterns, see the Didactic Pattern Visualizer by Iván Abreu. Also see the blog post on it (by hh) with examples and code: Tidal Visualization with Didactic Pattern Visualizer.