TidalCycles
TidalCycles is a live-coding environment for algorithmic musical patterns, embedded in Haskell and closely associated with the algorave scene — a term its creator, Alex McLean, coined together with Nick Collins. Its core is an expressive, time-based pattern language built for rapid construction of polyrhythmic and generative structures, with a cycle-based rhythm representation that draws on ideas from Indian classical music. Tidal doesn't generate sound on its own: in most setups it pairs with SuperDirt, a framework built on SuperCollider, for synthesis, while also supporting plain MIDI and OSC output and remaining extensible through a wider ecosystem of community tools.
tech specs
history
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The ideas behind Tidal date back to 2006, when Alex McLean, then a postgraduate student at Goldsmiths in London, presented an early domain-specific language for pattern rotation at a pecha-kucha-style event. He developed the concept further the following year for a project on computational creativity, using Kurt Schwitters' sound poem "Ursonate" to explore rhythmic continuation. Tidal itself took shape around 2009 during McLean's doctoral research, funded by the UK's EPSRC, and reached its 1.0 release in December 2018. Development has continued steadily since, with the project reaching version 1.10.0 in June 2025, and in 2021 McLean shifted its funding model from individual Ko-fi contributions to an OpenCollective-based system managed by a dedicated admin team.
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