tidal

The worldwide live coding community is a diverse group of people that includes programmers, academics, musicians, dancers, visual artists, and others who like to get together in person to share sounds, visuals, and ideas. Compared to some parts of the world where live coding events happen regularly, the Midwest does not have a lot of opportunities to experience live coding live. However, this week we have two live coding events within relatively close proximity.

I first attempted to install TidalCycles about six months ago, in May 2018. I've learned a lot in the past six months, and I'd like to share some of the knowledge I've acquired. If you are new to Tidal or you've tried it out in the past and got stuck, then this unnumbered list of observations is for you.

TidalCycles (or just "Tidal") is a programming language used for live coding. I'll leave further details about Tidal for another post, but essentially Tidal facilitates creating music with code. While the Tidal community hopes to make installing Tidal on GNU/Linux easier, I struggled to get Tidal working on Debian stable.