Learning music with Strudel • Hacker News Board

Re: Learning music with Strudel

#51

Post by raphar » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 5:54 PM UTC

rudolph9 wrote: post #41

raphar wrote: post #4

I posted this link, some days ago: Coding Trance Music from Scratch (Again) [video]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iu5rnQkfO6M It´s a well done programming and music performance

Is this real library/editor/programming-language ?? I don’t see anything on how it’s made?

It is!

She is using https://strudel.cc/

Re: Learning music with Strudel

#52

Post by butlike » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 6:02 PM UTC

DigitalDopamine wrote: post #3

Loved playing with it! https://strudel.cc/?qVv8Cr0OD6cc

You made an entire performance. Good, good job

Re: Learning music with Strudel

#53

Post by abhinavmir » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 6:09 PM UTC

DigitalDopamine wrote: post #3

Loved playing with it! https://strudel.cc/?qVv8Cr0OD6cc

I shed an actual tear. I dreamed of days like this. I got close, building a small language for generating generic music, but with decay, sawtooth and stuff? It's a functional DAW.

Re: Learning music with Strudel

#54

Post by simonw » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 6:10 PM UTC

DigitalDopamine wrote: post #3

Loved playing with it! https://strudel.cc/?qVv8Cr0OD6cc

That demo is excellent. You can uncomment some lines at the bottom and hit alt+enter (or click the Update button) to add visualization effects too.

Re: Learning music with Strudel

#55

Post by iamwil » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 6:11 PM UTC

mclau153 wrote: post #6

A really great source for this is DJ Dave

DJ Dave: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5OYiOGxHxTQ

She's using a live computational notebook as an instrument.

Re: Learning music with Strudel

#56

Post by dfltr » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 6:13 PM UTC

Strudel is dope and a ton of fun, but every single piece of its interface seems determined to confuse people who already know music theory and composition.

That's not really a point against it, it's a great tool and it's a ton of fun, but I wish there was a way to use it that at least kind of sort of mapped back to traditional music notation, especially rhythm notation.

Re: Learning music with Strudel

#57

Post by wouterjanl » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 6:14 PM UTC

Allow me to use this post to give big kudos to the maintainers of Strudel for having put together a brilliant set of official docs. I found them incredibly well put together and hence really useful to learn. I have played around with Strudel many evenings and I am always amazed about how intuitive Strudel is to create beats and sounds, to the point that I prefer to create music in Strudel over the established DAW software. I would love for there to be a good bridge between producing sounds and beats with Strudel code and structurering and mastering an entire track. This is missing in Strudel since it’s clearly build for a live coding environment. Any tips from users about ways or tools to make this bridge are always welcome!

Re: Learning music with Strudel

#58

Post by stuhlmueller » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 6:17 PM UTC

Here's a Strudel fork that uses LLMs to turn instructions like "add a bass layer" into code: https://github.com/stuhlmueller/strudel-llm

Re: Learning music with Strudel

#59

Post by WhyOhWhyQ » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 6:21 PM UTC

WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #40

Let me introduce you to a good time. Step 1: https://strudel.cc/workshop/getting-started/ . Click play on coastline" @by eddyflux Step 2: Listen for a while Step 3: setcps(.75) -> setcps(1.5) Step 4: Listen :) That is the extent of my strudel knowledge, but damn this is cool.

I was trying to make it automatically randomly choose between the normal speed and twice speed after a long time. I think appending

.fast(chooseCycles(1, 2).slow(128))

at the very end does it. But I'm not actually sure. Would a strudel user mind informing me how this is done? Also, I was hoping to make it automatically shift the key, but I couldn't figure it out.

Re: Learning music with Strudel

#60

Post by simonw » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 6:23 PM UTC

I've been seeing a few links to Strudel recently so I went digging to see how old the project is - looks like it launched in April 2022 https://loophole-letters.vercel.app/strudel

It came out of the same team as Tidal Cycles, a Haskell live-coding music tool which was first released around 2009. https://tidalcycles.org/docs/around_tidal/tidal_history/