Lil Data IM chat with Alex McLean…





data: Hi Alex McLean aka yaxu, creator of TidalCycles! What are you up to?

yaxu: I’m on the way home to the Socialist Republic after a weekend in a small dark room with a lot of speakers in Deptford listening to algorithmic patterns with some new friends. How are you doing?





data: I’m doing really good! I’m glad I can finally ask you things. Like, how much live code have you live coded?

yaxu: Quite a lot but I can’t remember very much of it and didn’t save much so it doesn’t matter. I just found this in my editor though which is proof that I have live coded something:

“`@tidal

d1 $ stack [off ”<0.25 0.125>“ (# (speed 2 # crush (slow 16 $ scale 2 16 saw))) $ someCycles (off 0.25 ((|*| up "12 0”) . struct “x(5,8)” . (# sound “supermandolin”))) $ jux rev $ sometimes (|+| n 12)

$ off 0.25 ((|+| n 7) . (# (s “superpiano” # gain 0.8))) $ chunk 4 ((|+| n 12) . (fast 2)) $ n “c3(3,8)” # sound “supermandolin”

# shape 0.6

# bpf (scale 300 1200 rand)

# bpq 10

# legato (scale 2 8 sine)

# gain 1.3

|+| n (“” + “[c g]/8”)

|*| gain 0.9

# room 0.4

]

“`





data: How much have animals influenced your music and your software? You have a cat right?

yaxu: Yes actually I have two cats, Douglas and Stanley, they tell me what to do but don’t really get involved in my code. I did once live code for a cat but it was already asleep.

I guess cats do have a lot of important procedures though and procedures are the basis of software engineering. I think live coding is not much to do with software engineering any more though.





data: How did Tidal come about?

yaxu: I wanted to free improvise with a percussionist friend and it was too slow to respond to him in existing scripting languages, I had to type in too much code to make each change. I got interested in how Bernard Bel was notating tabla rhythms and started experimenting with making a live coding language based on cyclic pattern. After a lot of performances with half-written software that eventually became Tidal, which is now mostly written and I can now make a change in a few seconds. Not as fast as a percussionist but it’s OK.





data: Would you rather make closed source software or be immortal? Those are the two things I think you might hate the most.

yaxu: I’d like to try out being immortal for a short while. I make closed source software all the time I just keep it to myself.

data: Two shocking answers.