Tidal Cycles

Tidal Cycles (or Tidal for short) is a language for live coding patterns, built on top of Haskell. It is used to create music by writing code in real-time, allowing for improvisation and experimentation.

I'm running this software on macOS with an M3 ARM chip. To produce a similar setup, you will need to install SuperCollider:

brew install --cask supercollider

This should also install the SuperCollider 3 plugins/extensions directory needed for Tidal's default samples.

To install Tidal Cycles, follow the directions on the Tidal Cycles website. First, install or update xcode:

/usr/bin/xcode-select --install

Then, run the Tidal bootstrap script. This will install a Haskell toolchain, the cabal package manager, the Pulsar text editor, SuperCollider (with SuperDirt samples library and sc-3 plugins), along with Tidal Cycles itself. If any of the dependencies are already installed, the script will skip them.

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tidalcycles/tidal-bootstrap/master/tidal-bootstrap.command -sSf | sh

After installation, ensure the sclang, ghci, and cabal commands are available in a terminal shell. You may need to edit your $PATH environment variable to include these binary directories.

For example, here's what I added to my ~/.zshrc file:

# GHCup - The Haskell Toolchain Installer
[ -s "$HOME/.ghcup/env" ] && source ${HOME}/.ghcup/env
# SuperCollider language to PATH
[ -s "/Applications/SuperCollider.app/Contents/MacOS/sclang" ] && export PATH="/Applications/SuperCollider.app/Contents/MacOS:$PATH"

• Tidal Cycles cheatsheet

Neovim

I'm using Neovim to edit .tidal code files with the grddavies/tidal.nvim plugin which provides shortcuts for interacting with Tidal Cycles and SuperCollider.

Running the :TidalLaunch command starts a Tidal Cycles REPL and a SuperCollider server. The :TidalQuit command stops both the REPL and the server. You can also send blocks of Tidal code to the REPL with shortcuts like <leader><CR>.

Treesitter

My configuration includes the Treesitter dependency for syntax highlighting in Haskell and SuperCollider scripts:

-- Tidal Cycles
{
  "grddavies/tidal.nvim",
  opts = require('plugins.tidal'),
  -- Recommended: Install TreeSitter parsers for Haskell and SuperCollider
  dependencies = {
    "nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter",
    opts = {
      ensure_installed = {
        "haskell",
        "supercollider"
      }
    }
  }
}

Here's my configuration (mostly defaults):

local opts = {
  --- Configure TidalLaunch command
  boot = {
    tidal = {
      --- Command to launch ghci with tidal installation
      cmd = "ghci",
      args = {
        "-v0",
      },
      --- Tidal boot file path
      file = vim.api.nvim_get_runtime_file("bootfiles/BootTidal.hs", false)[1],
      enabled = true,
    },
    sclang = {
      --- Command to launch SuperCollider
      cmd = "sclang",
      args = {},
      --- SuperCollider boot file
      file = vim.api.nvim_get_runtime_file("bootfiles/BootSuperDirt.scd", false)[1],
      enabled = true,
    },
    split = "v",
  },
  --- Default keymaps
  --- Set to false to disable all default mappings
  --- @type table | nil
  mappings = {
    send_line = { mode = { "i", "n" }, key = "<S-CR>" },
    send_visual = { mode = { "x" }, key = "<leader><CR>" },
    send_block = { mode = { "i", "n", "x" }, key = "<M-CR>" },
    send_node = { mode = "n", key = "<leader>kk" },
    send_silence = { mode = "n", key = "<leader>d" },
    send_hush = { mode = "n", key = "<leader><Esc>" },
  },
  ---- Configure highlight applied to selections sent to tidal interpreter
  selection_highlight = {
    --- Highlight definition table
    --- see ':h nvim_set_hl' for details
    --- @type vim.api.keyset.highlight
    highlight = { link = "IncSearch" },
    --- Duration to apply the highlight for
    timeout = 150,
  },
}

return opts

It will automatically read the Tidal and SuperCollider boot files from the plugin's bootfiles directory. You can customize the paths if needed. This is also where the SuperDirt samples library is loaded.