Marea.sc

This is an experimental take on TidalCycles in SuperCollider language. It brings some of the good stuff from TidalCycles while trying to play well with JITLib and the SC ecosystem.

Install

Open a new document on your SC IDE and type:

Quarks.install("https://github.com/munshkr/Marea.sc");

After a few seconds, you should see the following printed in the Post window:

Installing Marea
Installing Rational
Rational installed
Installing Bjorklund
Bjorklund installed
Marea installed
-> Quark: Marea[0.1.0]

Finally recompile your class library. Go to Language menu, Recompile class library, or hit Ctrl+Shift+L.

How it looks like right now?

Marea is still in early stages, so things may break and syntax is subject to change, but this is how it looks right now:

(
p = ProxySpace.push(s);
p.makeTempoClock;
)

(
~x.play;
~x = (degree: "0(3,8), 1 3, 6 7, 8 ~ 9, 2(7,16)/2".t).mp
    .every(2, {|p| p.within(0.75, 1, _.fast(2))})
    .every(3, _.brak)
    .every(2, _.rotRight(0.125))
  << (scale: Scale.dorian)
  << (carPartial: Pwhite(0,7)).mp
  << (modPartial: 2)
  << (octave: 3).mp.every(3, {|p| p << (octave: "4 5".t) <<+ (degree: "3 4 5".t)})
)

It plays well with ProxySpace and Ndef, and you can even use SC Pattern classes with them.

To do

• Basic functionality of Pattern and some functions
• Event playing
• ProxySpace compatibility
• +, -, *, / operators for patterns
• Refactor methods in classes that extend Pattern
• Tidal Parser
• Support for Pattern classes
• Define more signal patterns: saw, tri, pulse, envs (see Tidal refactor branch)
• Define palindrome, rev, cut, jux, juxBy
• Support for patterns on slow/fast/etc. using unwrap
• Define a way to dynamically define instance/class Pattern methods
• Write unit tests
• Write documentation

Some explanations

In Tidal, a Pattern is a function from an Arc (an interval of rationals that represent a time position measured in cycles) to a list of Events. An Event is a tuple of 3 things: a "position" arc, which indicates the start and end of the event, an "active" arc, which indicates the active part of the event when the pattern is queried, and the value of the event itself. Because a Pattern is a function, it can be evaluated or queried for a specific arc, and it will return the events that occur in that interval of time.

In Marea, a Pattern is a class (MareaPattern, or MP) that responds to value (same as a function), and does the same thing as Tidal, it returns an array of MareaEvent given start and end parameters.

Every pattern starts with either a pure or silence pattern. Any object can be converted to a pure or silence patterns by using MP.pure and MP.silence:

// Any object can be converted to a "pure" pattern
MP.pure(1)  //-> a MareaPattern

// Query the pattern for the first cycle: arc (0, 1)
MP.pure(1).value(0, 1)  //-> [ E(0/1 1/1, 0/1 1/1, 1) ]
// In SCLang you can also omit `value`:
MP.pure(1).(0, 1)  //-> [ E(0/1 1/1, 0/1 1/1, 1) ]

MP.silence.(0, 1)  //-> [ ]  ...silence always returns an empty array

A useful method is #mp, which is polymorphic to all objects. In general, calling mp on any object will convert it into a pure pattern, except for the following classes:

• Nil, Rest: Creates a silence pattern
• Array: Calls #mp on all of its elements and then #cat on the new array.
• Event: Calls #mp on its values and creates a new pattern whose event values are Events with their keys and values merged.

// silence/rest
nil.mp.(0, 1)  //-> [ ]

(k: 1, a: 2).mp.(0, 1)  //-> [ E(0/1 1/1, 0/1 1/1, ( 'a': 1, 'k': foo )) ]

Tidal language parser

In Tidal you can write Patterns in a more concise way as a string in a special language. You can read more about it at the Tidal docs. See grammar.md file if you want to the grammar specification.

In Marea you just write your pattern as a String and then call the t method:

"1 2 3".t  //-> a MareaPattern
"1 2 3".t.(0, 1)   //-> [ E(0/1 1/3, 0/1 1/3, 1), E(1/3 2/3, 1/3 2/3, 2), E(2/3 1/1, 2/3 1/1, 3) ]

So you would use it like this:

~x = (s: "[bd sn, hh hh ~ hh]".t).mp

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/munshkr/Marea.sc. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

LICENSE

See LICENSE