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Algorithmic music & live coding

Some of the most influential electronic music of the last seventy years was never played on a keyboard — it was written as code: rules, probabilities, and patterns that generate sound rather than encode it note by note. Algorave — club nights where musicians write and rewrite that code live, screens projected for the crowd — grew out of this lineage in the 2010s. Here's the landscape of languages and environments that made it possible, and a playable taste of the pattern-language style →.

A short history

The tools

Three shapes recur: write text in a DSP or general-purpose language, connect visual patch cables, or manipulate a dedicated pattern mini-language. Filter to compare on one axis at a time.

Strudel is the one entry here that runs entirely in the browser, no install — the same local-only, no-server shape every page on mmmt-tools follows. Its mini-notation (descended from TidalCycles) is also what the playable pattern demo teaches, in a small subset built from scratch on this site's own audio spine rather than embedding Strudel itself.

Next: Pattern Playground → · related on mmmt-tools — creative MIDI generators, the modular patchbay (a chaos source and a scale quantizer live there too).

Learn & Train